Carin Leong: What if people with type 1 diabetes could start making their own insulin?
Scientists have just taken a big step in that direction. They treated a patient with 80 million lab-made insulin-producing cells that are designed to hide from the immune system. This is the first time a cell transplant like this hasn’t triggered a rejection in a human, and researchers say that this opens exciting possibilities for treating diabetes and other autoimmune diseases in the future.
About two million people in the U.S. currently live with type 1 diabetes. It’s an autoimmune disease where the body mistakenly wipes out the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. Without this hormone, people have to rely on injections and pumps every single day to keep their blood sugar in check and avoid serious complications.
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Scientists have tried replacing these insulin-producing cells before, but the body kept attacking them. And patients would need to take strong immune-suppressing drugs for life, which come with their own laundry list of side effects.
This time, researchers took donor cells and used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to deactivate two genes that normally flag the immune system to attack foreign cells while also boosting expression of a gene that discourages attacks by the body’s immune cells.
So 12 weeks after injecting these cells into the patient, they were still alive and making insulin in his body. Granted, it wasn’t a ton—about 7 percent of what he'd need to ditch insulin injections entirely. But experts say it’s a major milestone for his body to be producing even a little bit of insulin on its own and, most importantly, without the need for immunosuppressants. They’ll continue monitoring him over the next year and test higher doses of these edited cells. And if all goes well, this could potentially lead us toward a cure for type 1 diabetes.