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A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells1. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body.
“I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjing, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everything — especially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.
James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.”
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Stem cell research is something i’ve found myself interested in lately. It’s crazy the amount of things it’s been able to accomplish.
You can thank dubya for vetoing that
Every sperm is sacred.
Or something.
/s
Only embryonic stem cells were because of Bush. America now uses induced pluripotent stem cells generated from in this case the patient herself but can also be made from any volunteer skin biopsy.
Because like all things republicans don’t like it.
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AND wE cAnT PrOfiT oFF yOu AnYmoRe
Eh, gotta be honest though. Democrats (at the Federal level) love money. Pelosi’s latest Visa stock gambit, vaccines, etc. They use the Republicans to stay profitable. Repubs contrive a fear, Dems monetize it. Capitalists at their core. Not looking out for the People. Just wall street. Because they genuinely believe the machine is what keeps us all living our lives, and to love the machine, and why not make some scratch while you’re at it?
Honestly, when I first read your comment I read “I’ve been able to accomplish” not “It’s been able to accomplish” and thought to myself… yeah, look, this is good research with tons of benefit potential for the world but maybe these laws are in place because DIY scientists with home labs shouldn’t be messing with it just yet, I mean, that sounds reasonable. The meme provided also kinda could be taken either way in the “I’ve”, “it’s”
But yeah, it took only a few seconds to re-read it and find my mistake. I had figured you were joking with the “I’ve” thing to prove a point, not that you were really experimenting with stem cells at home. Either way, it was a fun mental rabbit hole for about 5 seconds. So thank you.
And I agree with you, we should be funding this type of scientific research.
Ah yes I love performing stem cell transplants in my garage
Yeah, exactly, my brain substituting in the change of two letters and reading it like that caused a double take, especially because the last sentence was where it happened it made the comment feel more like a punchline than a statement.
I also found it interesting in how changing just two letter in an entire comment could change the whole meaning of the comment in my brain.
Always feels good to come across an uplifiting news story that isn’t also secretly dystopian. Cheers and Happy Friday.
The dystopian part is stem cell therapy is illegal because… reasons?
Fair point.
Effing religious nuts.
Only embryonic stem cells. This is using induced pluripotent stem cells which are not illegal.
In the early days it was an abortion-adjacent topic, which made it an easy target to vilify to rile up support from single-issue voters. Now a large portion of society will hate anything involving stem cells forever, regardless of facts. Once the culture war starts, it’s hard to get it to stop.
It’s only illegal in some places. And even that is kind of weak. There are stem cell clinics you can go to in almost every large metropolis in America if you have the money.
The sciences are really my last bastion of hope these days. I’m constantly amazed at the rate of discovery these days and how they at least show a glimmer of hope for the future.
It’s worth noting that a major caveat to this result pointed out in this article is that the woman is presently on immunosuppressants from a liver transplant, thus we don’t yet know the risks that the body’s immune system could just, after the transplant, do the same thing that causes T1D in the first place, which is attack and destroy the islets in the pancreas which produce insulin.
Still an absolutely fascinating result, and hopefully more data over the coming years gives us a better understanding of how this works over the long term.
Sounds like there’s a lot of money to be made for finding ways to ensure that your body does not attack the stem cells that are generated from your own body.
Those two therapies combined would be a trillion dollar combination therapy for the company that can make it work.
I wonder if the process they use to make the covid shots could help?
The tricky part about T1 is… We don’t know why the immune system is malfunctioning, only that it is. Without that vital piece of research, everything that presents as a cure is temporary at best.
Dr. Faustman out of Mass General has been conducting some trials into phase two or three using the BCG vaccine to treat / cure the immune response.
It’s nice to see the name Shapiro not linked to something vomit-worthy, for once.
That’s amazing, I’m so happy for her. Hot pot is delicious.
A dang happy article to read, I agree.
Capitalist insulin manufacturers:
we have a permanent revenue stream for a live saving medicine, and we can raise prices and they still have to buy it because otherwise they will die
Chinese scientists:
seize the means of your own insulin production with this one simple trick
When healthcare is a cost, not a revenue stream, those providing healthcare are inventivized to find permanent solutions instead of whatever generates return customers.
So does this mean she can now drink sugary beverages and eat cake without putting their life in peril?
