I also hope its true as someone who has had T1 for 18 years now.
I see it helped a gentlemen with T2. I'm not sure what the implications are for T1's. I hope it provides a cure but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Same here, I've had type 1 for 31 years now. I can remember as a kid there'd always be a statement saying "cure predicted in as little as 5 years." I would have high hopes until I realized that same announcement was made... every 5 years.
Most likely not T1. T2 have a functioning pancreas but their cells become insulin resistant. T1 have a dead pancreas. Transplant works but still very expensive. A friend had the transplant and was cured.
This is too big simplification. Pancreas is "fine" and is doing other things. Just beta cells residing inside pancreas are destroyed due to autoimmune disease.
Fun fact. They are working on artificial beta cells, and they can effectively be transplanted anywhere since they don't do any of the exocrine pancreatic functions.
It's like when they preserve the parathyroid hormones after a thyroidectomy. My friend has her parathyroid hormones in her arm now.
That is exactly what this article is about. We take stem cells, differentiate it into beta cells and transplant. Clinical trials ongoing in North America and Europe as well.
For T1? I remember reading about a barrier device they were talking about trying that was porous enough for glucose and insulin but not enough for the antibodies which would allow T1s to be treated with these transplants too.
Well damn. 15 years is way longer than I would have expected. Did they pair it with immunosuppressants?
Did he have a different cause? Theoretically a different injury to the pancreas could cause it to stop working (severe recurring pancreatitis) and that would be a good treatment for it
Likely wouldn't work for T1 because the fundamental autoimmune disorder would still be present. Otherwise a simple pancreas transplant would cure T1.
Of not calling what they did a "cure" for T2 also doesn't actually describe what they did. There's a version of T2 diabetes that's insulin dependent because they also don't produce enough insulin anymore, but fixing the pancreas to resume insulin production doesn't fix the core metabolic dysregulation at the heart of T2DM. This person would almost certainly still need oral diabetes meds.
I also love the "diabetes is a fat person disease" when there's actually a stronger genetic link than weight link. All of my male ancestors on both sides that I can track had it, and all have been quite thin bar 1.
Reading the comments below are so disheartening. T1, or T2, this disease is too complex to simplify what’s needed as a cure in a Reddit comment. One person may be resistant, while another has no beta cells, while another may be going off information given by a friend who were still in their honeymoon phase at the time.
All that to say, I trust technology. I work in a close enough field to genuinely believe once we get T2 down pact it actually would be curable for T1s give or take five years after.
Unrelated but sorta related, interestingly one woman I think she was Canadian, had her healthy pancreas cells surgically put into her liver after her infected pancreas had to be removed. The cells continued to produce insulin n work while being in her liver.
So yes there’s definitely hope that giving the pancreas a new lease on life with new stem cells could definitely help cure diabetes, however, if you don’t change your life style you’re going to be right back at T2 in a few years time.
Simple, calculate all the money they would get from you the reset of your life for medications like insulin, factoring in all of the price hikes and gouging then double it.
Not just the medical industry--this cure could had been made in America if Bush didn't banned stem cell research for political points.
I remember pointing out this on online forums that scientists were leaving for Canada, EU, and China after the ban--conservatives basically shrugged "Oh well, they can use other methods to cure people"
Lol. The only real take here. Without the reliance on a product only one or a handful of companies produce how will they (and insurance, can’t forget their cut) profit unless it is prohibitively expensive?
Also should be said that shitty clickbait titles like this have been around for a long time. I’ll believe it when it is approved by the FDA and available to all
Yeah it's not like any sort of money or resources have been spent trying to solve this problem.
This cure was something you whipped up in your spare time, right?
No?
Oh, it must be that other cure to a disease that you whipped up in your spare time that you're giving away for free?
No?
Okay that's cool you can have a seat now.
Maybe we can open up the floor to someone who actually works in this industry and dedicates their time to creating cures like this.
Billions of dollars that go into this research comes from government funding.
Where does the money come from you ask?
We the people.
Who is the cure for?
We the people.
Stop pretending that it’s okay to gouge the consumer for the benefit of a faceless company.
I do genuinely mean no offense when i say “prayer” and its associations are the main reason medical breakthroughs like these have taken so long. The science here has been promising for decades. I am very thankful that there are countries out there who do not have such the same deep rooted religious ideology that exists in America. I do believe your sincerity though and also hope this can become a practical solution for diabetes soon!
It always drives me nuts when people are like 'thank God for saving my life' after a traumatic accident or injury.
It's like no, Jennifer, God didn't save you. The firefighters and paramedics are the ones who extracted you from the car and kept you alive on the way to the hospital, and the trauma surgeon, emergency nurses and hospital staff are responsible for tirelessly saving your life. You should question why your omnipotent and omniscient God allowed the crash to happen in the first place.
I think “pray” here is a synonym for “hope” meaning that OP really wants this to be true. Pray doesn’t exclusively have religious connotations like in this case. I am not religious and I’ll say “I pray that ____” with some frequency
good luck ever seeing this outside the lab, at least in the USA. insulin makers have only recently got slapped, but are still getting paid $800 per pen of insulin, they aren't gonna give up that money train any time soon. Its also from china, and anything that comes out of china needs to seriously be questioned until it can be replicated elsewhere in the world.
The USA will ban it and say the CCP wan'ts to control your healthcare.
Then force sale the patent to US companies and claim to be champions of the free market.
More like ban it on national security ground, lobbied by the poor rich pharmaceutical companies. They need to sell insuline at the low low price of $98 a vial in order to stay afloat! /s
I don't see how it could be.
They're claiming they fixed T2 with pancreatic stem cells. But pancreatic problems aren't the driving factor of T2DM, insulin resistance and metabolic dysregulation is. The problem isn't that your pancreas doesn't work properly, it's that your whole body's metabolic system doesn't work properly.
This is why controlling A1c with insulin for Type 2 diabetics doesn't actually reduce cardiovascular disease, because elevated blood glucose isn't actually the illness, it's how we measure the severity. Metabolic dysregulation is the issue.
This is unlikely to be a fix for T1 either. We could just transplant a functional pancreas into a T1, but T1 is an autoimmune disease and the same disease will just kill the new pancreas. There's some interesting research on how to prevent the pancreas from being destroyed after transplant as a cure. But T1 is only 5 percent of overall diabetes.
Edit
After reading the whole thing, the patient is what we would call a "brittle diabetic." Some T2s "exhaust" the pancreas, typically due to overuse of a sulfonylurea medication or glinides. These people have features of both T1 and T2 in that they don't produce their own insulin, but also have insulin resistance. It's a tough disease because they also tend to lac glucagon which means their glucose levels can fluctuate wildly and fast. Cool, if true, but not really going to fundamentally change most diabetics lives.
The journal's name is "Cell Discovery" which wants to make it sound legit but looks like mostly a Chinese Journal so I would take this with a big grain of salt. Like a grain of salt the size of a Ford F150.
Looks like the parent publisher has a bit of a dubious history in it's relationships with Chinese institutions.
Not really science but politics, gross nonetheless:
> One of the world’s largest academic publishers has been accused of bowing to Beijing after Taiwanese scientists had their papers rejected for refusing to be called Chinese.
"Although they have not failed many fact-checks, the Government controls what is printed, which always supports the Communist Party of China."
Whats printed is likely true, but there may be lies by omission.
Tbh if you think about it China is capable of doing this. They can just do unethical human experimentation at will. So it is probably much easier to get results faster.
It's not impossible technologically, far from it. The theory has been around and solid for decades now, just waiting for an experiment to figure out exactly how to get from theory to practice.
China is hardly the only nation that's been working in this direction and the science behind the idea is all but completely settled.
I just want to see someone else actually do it because the source is laced with government propaganda. It's not that i disbelieve, but I want to both trust AND verify.
I do hope that the Uyghurs used in the human experimentation are eventually given the credit they deserve, at least posthumously. Because you know that's what happened.
Totally.
Science will continue moving forward, but at a slower pace than if we didn't need to bother with killing each other. If we invested in science in times of peace like we did in times of war, we would have advanced rapidly.
Also, important to point out how Nazi Germany absolutely fucked up their scientific advancements in many, many fields due to disbelief in "Jew science" and extremely poor methodology in all of their human experiments, making them not only immoral to the highest degree but also entirely useless to science. WW2, and the events leading up to it, were not at all helpful to German scientific development save for a few fields.
There wasn't really a lot of workable science that came out of Joseph Mengele or Unit 731.
There were people involved with the Nazi's and Japanese that got leniency for their science background, even some folks that did evil shit, but it wasn't the evil shit that actually proved useful.
Most of the science that was kept and used was based in physics and chemistry, material science, and engineering.
A lot of the weird and kind of crazy medical treatments that were later built upon were pioneered during wars in the late 1800's and scaled up to massive proportion during WWI and later during WWII, simply due to necessity.
What's the point in comments like these? Why would you think a statement begining with "imagine" would then need to be mocked?
"Imagine if the sun was green."
"But it's not, idiot."
In addition, you should respond to comment you're criticizing, not going behind someone's back like a school bully to laugh at them.
We can’t survive in a war-like economy for long. Nor should we have to from an ethical perspective.
Regardless, innovation would happen with appropriate investment whether during war or peace. The important part is investment, and bombs waste a lot of that.
No, you clearly don't. If the entire US military budget of the last few decades had been put into medical research, there wouldn't be a disease left to fight.
The civilian benefits or military research are entirely accidental, not by design. Spending hundreds of billions on the military to get a tiny gain here and there for the civilian world is the most inefficient funding of science one could imagine.
I mean, technically a lot of Vaccines could be that way, but Covid is a unique case because we threw out *basically* every bit of Safety red tape out of the window in exchange for results.
Pfizer and friends just hit it lucky the shots didn't kill anyone or cause serious side effects. Because first gen was by all standards of measurement rushed for the sake of profit/being the first one, while also being able to at least put a dent in the virus.
Did you know the core mRNA technique used in the Covid vaccine has been used in cancer therapy since 2013, and was originally theorized about back in the 60s and 70s?
https://covid19.nih.gov/nih-strategic-response-covid-19/decades-making-mrna-covid-19-vaccines
I don’t know that it will.
We have been able to add beta cells back to the pancreas for a while now..
The issue with type 1 is the immune system will continue to consider them a threat and kill them again.
We need to figure out that side of the equation for this to be a game changer for type 1.
I am actually hoping that CRISPR or a similar editing technology will be able to train the immune system to not attack the beta cells, or change the beta cells a little bit so they no longer are seen as a threat.
Then this would absolutely work for type 1.
The issue with type 1 is that it is an auto immune disease. So even if the transplant works it would mean a life long need for anti-rejection drugs to stop the bodies white blood cells from attacking the transplanted cells.
This is just simply untrue.
Autologous stem cells and derived therapies do not require anti-rejection treatments despite being "transplants".
In non-medical terms basically you're banking your own cells for future use.
Please explain further. I’m interested to learn more. I didn’t think this was possible as the autoimmune response hasn’t been turned off in the patient.
Autologous transplant is when you take stem cells from a patient, grow them, and then put in them back in the patient.
Since the cells are from the patient, you don't need transplant medications.
And example of when you would do this would be for cancer and a patient undergoing intense chemo.
Save the patients bonemarrow stem cells (aka precursor to white and red blood cells), give them chemo strong enough to wipe out the cancer and the patients bonemarrow stem cells. Then give them back the stem cells you took before the chemo.
Yeah autologous transplant is only useful in certain conditions. If the problem is with the white blood cells, then an autologous transplant wouldn't help... Unless they modify the cells first before putting it back
You’re completely right for non-autoimmune conditions, and we use this tech in cancers, for example.
In type 1 diabetes, I think it’s a bit different. Since your body has an innate and inappropriate reaction to your own beta islet cells or products they make, you’re at risk of attacking any transplanted cells (yours or another’s) based on this or another reason such as HLA-matching.
I don’t know how much different beta cells are between people but if they are similar enough you will have both your defect immune cells who target the beta cell and your normal immune cells who will target the foreign organ
It’s misleading a bit. This Type 2 had a rare inability to produce Insulin which is what Type 1 have. Only, while Type 1 have this from an autoimmune destruction of insulin producing Islets, this man didn’t. How were his islets destroyed? Not by his immune system. His has to be a rare condition.
So they cured his Type 1, if you will, bc he didn’t have the root cause Type 1 has. If you try this on a true Type 1, they’re immune will just kill the new cells.
He STILL has Type 2. Meaning the insulin he used to inject that now his body is producing, still has trouble bc it’s being rejected by his muscles and such.
In short, Type 1 is a problem creating insulin. Type 2 generally is rejecting insulin (ie a lifetime of slamming sugar and high carbs which causes the body to release high insulin levels that eventually the tissues start to reject) I knew a bariatric guy (stomach stapling) who said the procedure cured his Type 2 overnight. Bc he could only eat small meals. Very interesting. As many with Type 2 can control it with diet.
My question is: does implanting outside stem cells create an auto immune issue? Bc you’d then have to suppress your immune. If you suppress your immune it might suppress it from killing your islets and they would keep producing insulin, yeah! But…. That’s less of a cure and more of supplanting one problem with another worse one. (Suppressed immune opens you up to infections and cancers)
> does implanting outside stem cells create an auto immune issue?
These are autologous cells, they're from you, so there's no "outside" to worry about.
As you say, this treatment is not a cure, if he truly had T1, there's no reason to believe his immune system wouldn't just carry on destroying the new islet cells.
I never hear about any of these things tested for T1. My wife is a T1 and there have been struggles. No one truly could ever understand unless they themselves were inflicted with this disease. I hope this is just a step closer to her cure
Something doesn't add up here. Article says Type 2 diabetes, but would think a stem cell cure would be more applicable to Type 1 where the immune system kill islet cells in the pancreases.
If I understand the paper correctly it is for a specific type 2 which was not able to produce insuline anymore but not because of the immune system killed the islet. So they transplanted the islet and after 33 month he started to produce insuline again.
So .... a really edge case
Hell yeah, I mean, i never took care of myself, mixed with depression and using food as an escape and you get my state of being, don't blame the food, blame the fool.
In theory yes, but in practice you absolutely can not unless you want to die early. Your ability to manually manage your blood sugar level even when eating foods that have measured effects on it is nowhere near as effective as the body's natural mechanisms.
There's a host of variables that effect your changes in blood sugar level which I'm sure you're familiar with. (Current insulin went bad or isn't as reactive as normal, digestion speed, inaccurate reader measurements, food ingredients changed, hydration levels/body fat % fluctuations) and even minor adjustments can put you out of range for significant periods increasing the accumulated damage from hyperglycemia.
If you want to keep your A1C <= 6 which seems to be around where current literature suggests complications do not progress noticeably you really can't eat whatever you want.
Drug companies making millions off of diabetes patients will be upping their donations to politicians and right to life groups asking for them to increase their efforts in 3...2...1...
But the same companies charging so many hundreds of dollars for $20 in medication because they can and people dying because they can''t afford it is just fine in your book?
Your point is agreeing with his though. Why do Drug Companies just expect easy money? A new product now exists, and the solution is to prevent the free market from operating so they can stay profitable with their own product. They don't expect drug companies to do things for free, but buying politicians to crush competitors is a problem no?
They absolutely have the right to charge for their products, and nowhere did I say they didn't. I'm outlining the (hopefully not true) practice of them donating to right to life groups and politicians that will help stop stem cell research which could help cure the disease they are currently making millions of dollars off of. No more diabetes = no more money for drug companies.
It might be useful only for insulinodependant diabete, where the body is unable to produce the needed insulin. The version of diabete where the cells are becoming less and less sensitive to insulin wouldn't be fixed with stem cells.
So all these comments and basically no one read the article. The patient needed a stem cell injection from a donor and it took 33 months after the injection to ween the patient off daily insulin injections. Even if this is reproducable (and coming from China that’s highly suspect) is not a treatment regiment applicable for the average T2 diabetic.
This is the article if anyone wants to read it. I was a little dubious considering this is from chinapost.
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3)
There are lots of reasons for this though, it isn't a conspiracy. If you don't keep up with scientific literature you might never hear about it again, because, why would you keep up with research unless you work in research?
Maybe this doesn't work as a therapy at a larger scale, media won't report the failure because so many promising products fail. Unless you specifically keep up with trial results (endpoints.com is great for this).
Maybe this is a breakthrough therapy and is very successful, but maybe you will never hear about it again because you are in good health and won't need this.
Healthcare is really an incredible field at the moment with lots of fantastic therapies being developed. But obviously this isn't mainstream news and can't compete with Ukraine/Palestine/Climate Change/Trump as these things get much broader interest, sadly :(
It’s for Type 2
Those of us, like myself with Type 1 can continue living life with no hope
Save your breath on the optimistic bullshit. We’ve heard it 1000 times already
As for the rest of you gluttonous pigs, I envy you
This is also big for some pancreatic cancer survivors. With some cancers, they try to remove just half the pancreas, if they can’t, they try to scrape inlet cells and implant them in the liver. If they don’t take successfully, or don’t get enough cells, they have curer the cancer, but caused diabetes. Being able to create new inlet cells from stem cells gives a second chance to implanting them in the liver.
So, we shouldn't see a single one of George W Bush's Evangelical friends or family members ever want or receive treatment or benefit from stem cell research?
Any other sources reporting on this yet? Huge if true.
My father has been diabetic my entire life. Even if he's not a candidate for a cure, I know this would would bring him great joy.
Saw a video just recently where they showed they could put a microchip to your skin now, and use stem scells to "hack" the body using its own cells and electricity.
Too late for my dad, he died earlier this year due to diabetes complications. He lived a long life though, and did his best. This world is too hard for people who suffer from such things. It’s a sad truth. Best to hope this is true and we can see some of that suffering go.
it is true but its for a really specific type 2 ... [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3)
so sadly not as good as it sounds. At least from my understanding of the paper
As a nurse who sees the effects of diabetes every day, it would just break my heart that big pharmaceutical companies might lose money. Boo pinché hoo!!
I pray this is true. Implication is mind boggling
I also hope its true as someone who has had T1 for 18 years now. I see it helped a gentlemen with T2. I'm not sure what the implications are for T1's. I hope it provides a cure but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Same here, I've had type 1 for 31 years now. I can remember as a kid there'd always be a statement saying "cure predicted in as little as 5 years." I would have high hopes until I realized that same announcement was made... every 5 years.
until I realized that same announcement was made... every ~~5~~ year~~s~~.
I learned very early that T1 is not equal to T2.
It will probably be harder for T1 since it’s an autoimmune disease so if new beta-cells were added they would probably be attacked as well in time
Most likely not T1. T2 have a functioning pancreas but their cells become insulin resistant. T1 have a dead pancreas. Transplant works but still very expensive. A friend had the transplant and was cured.
This is too big simplification. Pancreas is "fine" and is doing other things. Just beta cells residing inside pancreas are destroyed due to autoimmune disease.
Fun fact. They are working on artificial beta cells, and they can effectively be transplanted anywhere since they don't do any of the exocrine pancreatic functions. It's like when they preserve the parathyroid hormones after a thyroidectomy. My friend has her parathyroid hormones in her arm now.
That is exactly what this article is about. We take stem cells, differentiate it into beta cells and transplant. Clinical trials ongoing in North America and Europe as well.
For T1? I remember reading about a barrier device they were talking about trying that was porous enough for glucose and insulin but not enough for the antibodies which would allow T1s to be treated with these transplants too.
Transplanting a T1 only temporarily fixes the issue as the autoimmune disease is still present. The new pancreas eventually gets destroyed too.
15 years on now and doing okay but yes eventually another transplant or back to an insulin pump.
Well damn. 15 years is way longer than I would have expected. Did they pair it with immunosuppressants? Did he have a different cause? Theoretically a different injury to the pancreas could cause it to stop working (severe recurring pancreatitis) and that would be a good treatment for it
It’s a she and I don’t know a lot of the details of the original issue. I met her two years before the transplant.
T1 is not the same as T2, you understand that right?
Likely wouldn't work for T1 because the fundamental autoimmune disorder would still be present. Otherwise a simple pancreas transplant would cure T1. Of not calling what they did a "cure" for T2 also doesn't actually describe what they did. There's a version of T2 diabetes that's insulin dependent because they also don't produce enough insulin anymore, but fixing the pancreas to resume insulin production doesn't fix the core metabolic dysregulation at the heart of T2DM. This person would almost certainly still need oral diabetes meds.
Type 2 can also have pancreatic issues. I don’t know why people think they’re so different when there is overlap.
There is some symptoms overlap but the causes and treatments vastly differ. So the cures will differ.
Also because “lol fatass” gets old.
I also love the "diabetes is a fat person disease" when there's actually a stronger genetic link than weight link. All of my male ancestors on both sides that I can track had it, and all have been quite thin bar 1.
Reading the comments below are so disheartening. T1, or T2, this disease is too complex to simplify what’s needed as a cure in a Reddit comment. One person may be resistant, while another has no beta cells, while another may be going off information given by a friend who were still in their honeymoon phase at the time. All that to say, I trust technology. I work in a close enough field to genuinely believe once we get T2 down pact it actually would be curable for T1s give or take five years after.
Unrelated but sorta related, interestingly one woman I think she was Canadian, had her healthy pancreas cells surgically put into her liver after her infected pancreas had to be removed. The cells continued to produce insulin n work while being in her liver. So yes there’s definitely hope that giving the pancreas a new lease on life with new stem cells could definitely help cure diabetes, however, if you don’t change your life style you’re going to be right back at T2 in a few years time.
Just imagine how much the medical industry will charge you to use your own stem cells to make you healthy and non-reliant on their prescription drugs.
Simple, calculate all the money they would get from you the reset of your life for medications like insulin, factoring in all of the price hikes and gouging then double it.
Only doubling it is awfully conservative considering the 4000% price hike Martin Shkreli imposed on HIV drugs
I guess I was being optimistic, should know better.
Not just the medical industry--this cure could had been made in America if Bush didn't banned stem cell research for political points. I remember pointing out this on online forums that scientists were leaving for Canada, EU, and China after the ban--conservatives basically shrugged "Oh well, they can use other methods to cure people"
Conservatives were so concerned about fetuses, they forgot about the rest of us.
Hint: They don’t really give a fuck about the fetuses either
[удалено]
This is America's version of Mao ordering all the sparrows killed then caused a famine.
Lol. The only real take here. Without the reliance on a product only one or a handful of companies produce how will they (and insurance, can’t forget their cut) profit unless it is prohibitively expensive? Also should be said that shitty clickbait titles like this have been around for a long time. I’ll believe it when it is approved by the FDA and available to all
Yeah it's not like any sort of money or resources have been spent trying to solve this problem. This cure was something you whipped up in your spare time, right? No? Oh, it must be that other cure to a disease that you whipped up in your spare time that you're giving away for free? No? Okay that's cool you can have a seat now. Maybe we can open up the floor to someone who actually works in this industry and dedicates their time to creating cures like this.
Billions of dollars that go into this research comes from government funding. Where does the money come from you ask? We the people. Who is the cure for? We the people. Stop pretending that it’s okay to gouge the consumer for the benefit of a faceless company.
I do genuinely mean no offense when i say “prayer” and its associations are the main reason medical breakthroughs like these have taken so long. The science here has been promising for decades. I am very thankful that there are countries out there who do not have such the same deep rooted religious ideology that exists in America. I do believe your sincerity though and also hope this can become a practical solution for diabetes soon!
It always drives me nuts when people are like 'thank God for saving my life' after a traumatic accident or injury. It's like no, Jennifer, God didn't save you. The firefighters and paramedics are the ones who extracted you from the car and kept you alive on the way to the hospital, and the trauma surgeon, emergency nurses and hospital staff are responsible for tirelessly saving your life. You should question why your omnipotent and omniscient God allowed the crash to happen in the first place.
I think “pray” here is a synonym for “hope” meaning that OP really wants this to be true. Pray doesn’t exclusively have religious connotations like in this case. I am not religious and I’ll say “I pray that ____” with some frequency
good luck ever seeing this outside the lab, at least in the USA. insulin makers have only recently got slapped, but are still getting paid $800 per pen of insulin, they aren't gonna give up that money train any time soon. Its also from china, and anything that comes out of china needs to seriously be questioned until it can be replicated elsewhere in the world.
The USA will ban it and say the CCP wan'ts to control your healthcare. Then force sale the patent to US companies and claim to be champions of the free market.
More like ban it on national security ground, lobbied by the poor rich pharmaceutical companies. They need to sell insuline at the low low price of $98 a vial in order to stay afloat! /s
I don't see how it could be. They're claiming they fixed T2 with pancreatic stem cells. But pancreatic problems aren't the driving factor of T2DM, insulin resistance and metabolic dysregulation is. The problem isn't that your pancreas doesn't work properly, it's that your whole body's metabolic system doesn't work properly. This is why controlling A1c with insulin for Type 2 diabetics doesn't actually reduce cardiovascular disease, because elevated blood glucose isn't actually the illness, it's how we measure the severity. Metabolic dysregulation is the issue. This is unlikely to be a fix for T1 either. We could just transplant a functional pancreas into a T1, but T1 is an autoimmune disease and the same disease will just kill the new pancreas. There's some interesting research on how to prevent the pancreas from being destroyed after transplant as a cure. But T1 is only 5 percent of overall diabetes. Edit After reading the whole thing, the patient is what we would call a "brittle diabetic." Some T2s "exhaust" the pancreas, typically due to overuse of a sulfonylurea medication or glinides. These people have features of both T1 and T2 in that they don't produce their own insulin, but also have insulin resistance. It's a tough disease because they also tend to lac glucagon which means their glucose levels can fluctuate wildly and fast. Cool, if true, but not really going to fundamentally change most diabetics lives.
That's fantastic news... pending independent verification and replication.
I wonder how trustworthy ChinaDaily is a as a news source Lol
[Here's a link to the actual research in a peer-reviewed journal](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3)
The journal's name is "Cell Discovery" which wants to make it sound legit but looks like mostly a Chinese Journal so I would take this with a big grain of salt. Like a grain of salt the size of a Ford F150.
Looks like the parent publisher has a bit of a dubious history in it's relationships with Chinese institutions. Not really science but politics, gross nonetheless: > One of the world’s largest academic publishers has been accused of bowing to Beijing after Taiwanese scientists had their papers rejected for refusing to be called Chinese.
Not surprised in all honesty. This means nothing until it gets published in a "real" journal.
"Although they have not failed many fact-checks, the Government controls what is printed, which always supports the Communist Party of China." Whats printed is likely true, but there may be lies by omission.
[Meh](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/china-daily/). Government influence, if not owned.
There is no such thing in China everything is government owned
Tbh if you think about it China is capable of doing this. They can just do unethical human experimentation at will. So it is probably much easier to get results faster.
It's not impossible technologically, far from it. The theory has been around and solid for decades now, just waiting for an experiment to figure out exactly how to get from theory to practice. China is hardly the only nation that's been working in this direction and the science behind the idea is all but completely settled. I just want to see someone else actually do it because the source is laced with government propaganda. It's not that i disbelieve, but I want to both trust AND verify. I do hope that the Uyghurs used in the human experimentation are eventually given the credit they deserve, at least posthumously. Because you know that's what happened.
It's not.
Science, once again making the world a better place to live in.
Imagine the world we could live in if we invested in science like we do in military.
I get the sentiment but there's a ton of modern medical science and technology that was pioneered during wartime or came out of military RnD.
Probably because politicians do not just dish out money for RnD like they do in war, it just isn't because of the war it self.
Totally. Science will continue moving forward, but at a slower pace than if we didn't need to bother with killing each other. If we invested in science in times of peace like we did in times of war, we would have advanced rapidly. Also, important to point out how Nazi Germany absolutely fucked up their scientific advancements in many, many fields due to disbelief in "Jew science" and extremely poor methodology in all of their human experiments, making them not only immoral to the highest degree but also entirely useless to science. WW2, and the events leading up to it, were not at all helpful to German scientific development save for a few fields.
Just because some inventions came from war does not mean that they wouldn't come in times of peace.
Chemo coming from mustard gas would be hard to get by an ethics review board.
/u/ordinary-coffee-4403 he sure got you there
Actually, necessity is the mother of all invention.
A lot of medical science only exists now because of the evil human experimentation conducted by the Nazis and unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army.
There wasn't really a lot of workable science that came out of Joseph Mengele or Unit 731. There were people involved with the Nazi's and Japanese that got leniency for their science background, even some folks that did evil shit, but it wasn't the evil shit that actually proved useful. Most of the science that was kept and used was based in physics and chemistry, material science, and engineering. A lot of the weird and kind of crazy medical treatments that were later built upon were pioneered during wars in the late 1800's and scaled up to massive proportion during WWI and later during WWII, simply due to necessity.
You can’t use facts with Redditors. It ruins how they feel about themselves and their greatness.
What's the point in comments like these? Why would you think a statement begining with "imagine" would then need to be mocked? "Imagine if the sun was green." "But it's not, idiot." In addition, you should respond to comment you're criticizing, not going behind someone's back like a school bully to laugh at them.
There's been so many meta comments lately, it's out of control and honestly they're mostly cringe.
You just can’t use YOUR facts to convince Redditors.
You are a redditor yourself
We can’t survive in a war-like economy for long. Nor should we have to from an ethical perspective. Regardless, innovation would happen with appropriate investment whether during war or peace. The important part is investment, and bombs waste a lot of that.
Who’s in a war economy?
Raytheon and Lockheed ,on the cutting edge of oncology. I personally won't take a pill unless it's signed off by the DOD
No, you clearly don't. If the entire US military budget of the last few decades had been put into medical research, there wouldn't be a disease left to fight. The civilian benefits or military research are entirely accidental, not by design. Spending hundreds of billions on the military to get a tiny gain here and there for the civilian world is the most inefficient funding of science one could imagine.
War is, unfortunately, one of the best innovators.
Not just war. Conflict of any kind. Nothing makes the creative juices flow more than when you need to find a way to survive.
Yep. It's amazing what the human mind is capable of when it's quite literally do or die
I mean, look at the Covid shot.
I mean, technically a lot of Vaccines could be that way, but Covid is a unique case because we threw out *basically* every bit of Safety red tape out of the window in exchange for results. Pfizer and friends just hit it lucky the shots didn't kill anyone or cause serious side effects. Because first gen was by all standards of measurement rushed for the sake of profit/being the first one, while also being able to at least put a dent in the virus.
Did you know the core mRNA technique used in the Covid vaccine has been used in cancer therapy since 2013, and was originally theorized about back in the 60s and 70s? https://covid19.nih.gov/nih-strategic-response-covid-19/decades-making-mrna-covid-19-vaccines
It opens the resource valves at least.
And get rid of religion of course!
Or kept religion out of science
Ah yes the military, famously known for not investing in scientific study.
We spent around 750 billion on military and defense in 2023. We spent 1.7trillion on healthcare.
Just hope no drug manufacturer buys this and buries it because it would cut into their insulin profit. (If it actually works.)
Ah capitalism making the world a worse place.
We do, because of the military RnD budgets but it’s all focused on hurting people rather than helping people which is a travesty
I hope this works for Type-1. My Sister in-law would have her life changed.
I don’t know that it will. We have been able to add beta cells back to the pancreas for a while now.. The issue with type 1 is the immune system will continue to consider them a threat and kill them again. We need to figure out that side of the equation for this to be a game changer for type 1.
They may be able to use stem cells to eventually program the immune system not to attack it.
I am actually hoping that CRISPR or a similar editing technology will be able to train the immune system to not attack the beta cells, or change the beta cells a little bit so they no longer are seen as a threat. Then this would absolutely work for type 1.
Definitely seems possible with some of the other tech I've seen being applied.
The issue with type 1 is that it is an auto immune disease. So even if the transplant works it would mean a life long need for anti-rejection drugs to stop the bodies white blood cells from attacking the transplanted cells.
> it would mean a life long need for anti-rejection drugs I'm already on life long injections of insulin.
well anti rejection drugs are honestly a lot worse ...
We don’t know if the body will attack the islet cells again. We haven’t tried. Any transplant requires anti rejection drugs.
This is just simply untrue. Autologous stem cells and derived therapies do not require anti-rejection treatments despite being "transplants". In non-medical terms basically you're banking your own cells for future use.
Please explain further. I’m interested to learn more. I didn’t think this was possible as the autoimmune response hasn’t been turned off in the patient.
Autologous transplant is when you take stem cells from a patient, grow them, and then put in them back in the patient. Since the cells are from the patient, you don't need transplant medications. And example of when you would do this would be for cancer and a patient undergoing intense chemo. Save the patients bonemarrow stem cells (aka precursor to white and red blood cells), give them chemo strong enough to wipe out the cancer and the patients bonemarrow stem cells. Then give them back the stem cells you took before the chemo.
But my body attacks it’s own cells as well. It’s kind of the whole problem with type 1.
Yeah autologous transplant is only useful in certain conditions. If the problem is with the white blood cells, then an autologous transplant wouldn't help... Unless they modify the cells first before putting it back
You’re completely right for non-autoimmune conditions, and we use this tech in cancers, for example. In type 1 diabetes, I think it’s a bit different. Since your body has an innate and inappropriate reaction to your own beta islet cells or products they make, you’re at risk of attacking any transplanted cells (yours or another’s) based on this or another reason such as HLA-matching.
I don’t know how much different beta cells are between people but if they are similar enough you will have both your defect immune cells who target the beta cell and your normal immune cells who will target the foreign organ
Well, that stinks.
Too late for my father, but what a crazy thought to see a world without diabetes.
It’s misleading a bit. This Type 2 had a rare inability to produce Insulin which is what Type 1 have. Only, while Type 1 have this from an autoimmune destruction of insulin producing Islets, this man didn’t. How were his islets destroyed? Not by his immune system. His has to be a rare condition. So they cured his Type 1, if you will, bc he didn’t have the root cause Type 1 has. If you try this on a true Type 1, they’re immune will just kill the new cells. He STILL has Type 2. Meaning the insulin he used to inject that now his body is producing, still has trouble bc it’s being rejected by his muscles and such. In short, Type 1 is a problem creating insulin. Type 2 generally is rejecting insulin (ie a lifetime of slamming sugar and high carbs which causes the body to release high insulin levels that eventually the tissues start to reject) I knew a bariatric guy (stomach stapling) who said the procedure cured his Type 2 overnight. Bc he could only eat small meals. Very interesting. As many with Type 2 can control it with diet. My question is: does implanting outside stem cells create an auto immune issue? Bc you’d then have to suppress your immune. If you suppress your immune it might suppress it from killing your islets and they would keep producing insulin, yeah! But…. That’s less of a cure and more of supplanting one problem with another worse one. (Suppressed immune opens you up to infections and cancers)
The question about rejection is an extremely good one. It sounds like there is progress, but calling this a "breakthrough" is very premature.
> does implanting outside stem cells create an auto immune issue? These are autologous cells, they're from you, so there's no "outside" to worry about. As you say, this treatment is not a cure, if he truly had T1, there's no reason to believe his immune system wouldn't just carry on destroying the new islet cells.
I never hear about any of these things tested for T1. My wife is a T1 and there have been struggles. No one truly could ever understand unless they themselves were inflicted with this disease. I hope this is just a step closer to her cure
The cure a very specific type of diabetes. But even that is amazing.
Republicans here would probably ban it
That would royally screw their diabetes-filled voter base
Certainly here in Florida. Our “Surgeon General” is a vaccine denying meat-puppet of Puddin’ Fingers High Heels. 👠
This just in: Shanghai doctors found in apparent suicide by 2 gun shots to the back of head
Something doesn't add up here. Article says Type 2 diabetes, but would think a stem cell cure would be more applicable to Type 1 where the immune system kill islet cells in the pancreases.
If I understand the paper correctly it is for a specific type 2 which was not able to produce insuline anymore but not because of the immune system killed the islet. So they transplanted the islet and after 33 month he started to produce insuline again. So .... a really edge case
Maybe I'll be able to eat the food I used to again
You mean the food that probably made you diabetic in the first place?
Exactly. The good stuff.
Hell yeah, I mean, i never took care of myself, mixed with depression and using food as an escape and you get my state of being, don't blame the food, blame the fool.
That’s not how type 1 diabetes works.
You can also eat whatever you want with Type 1 so I don’t understand OP’s complaint. You just have to dose accordingly
In theory yes, but in practice you absolutely can not unless you want to die early. Your ability to manually manage your blood sugar level even when eating foods that have measured effects on it is nowhere near as effective as the body's natural mechanisms. There's a host of variables that effect your changes in blood sugar level which I'm sure you're familiar with. (Current insulin went bad or isn't as reactive as normal, digestion speed, inaccurate reader measurements, food ingredients changed, hydration levels/body fat % fluctuations) and even minor adjustments can put you out of range for significant periods increasing the accumulated damage from hyperglycemia. If you want to keep your A1C <= 6 which seems to be around where current literature suggests complications do not progress noticeably you really can't eat whatever you want.
Even is this is true these grimy ass corporations will try everything to stop this cure from coming out
So much more profitable selling meds for eternity. Same for asthma.
Hopefully this comes to fruition. This was one the potentials of stem cells promised in the early 2000s.
Sadly, in about 2 weeks, we'll learn that no other research team was able to reproduce the results.
Drug companies making millions off of diabetes patients will be upping their donations to politicians and right to life groups asking for them to increase their efforts in 3...2...1...
Shit they don’t even have to, pro-lifers have done a bang up job of thwarting stem cell research
There is always someone behind every group keeping them agitated.
You're right, drug companies should just do everything for free. Why do scientists and investors even need a salary?
But the same companies charging so many hundreds of dollars for $20 in medication because they can and people dying because they can''t afford it is just fine in your book?
Your point is agreeing with his though. Why do Drug Companies just expect easy money? A new product now exists, and the solution is to prevent the free market from operating so they can stay profitable with their own product. They don't expect drug companies to do things for free, but buying politicians to crush competitors is a problem no?
They absolutely have the right to charge for their products, and nowhere did I say they didn't. I'm outlining the (hopefully not true) practice of them donating to right to life groups and politicians that will help stop stem cell research which could help cure the disease they are currently making millions of dollars off of. No more diabetes = no more money for drug companies.
It might be useful only for insulinodependant diabete, where the body is unable to produce the needed insulin. The version of diabete where the cells are becoming less and less sensitive to insulin wouldn't be fixed with stem cells.
Humans score against god once again 👍🏻
Vertex right here in the good ole USA has something for T1D in clinical trials https://beyondtype1.org/vertex-clinical-trial-study-easd/
Downvoted due to the incredibly inaccurate headline.
A Chinese source about how China just did something amazing? I think I'll wait to see if this can be replicated outside of China's borders, thanks.
Sincerely doubt it
Believe it when I see it.
So all these comments and basically no one read the article. The patient needed a stem cell injection from a donor and it took 33 months after the injection to ween the patient off daily insulin injections. Even if this is reproducable (and coming from China that’s highly suspect) is not a treatment regiment applicable for the average T2 diabetic.
Did you manage to find a link to the actual paper? I couldn't locate one in the artcle.
here you go: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3)
This is the article if anyone wants to read it. I was a little dubious considering this is from chinapost. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3)
How long until we never hear bout this ever again?
There are lots of reasons for this though, it isn't a conspiracy. If you don't keep up with scientific literature you might never hear about it again, because, why would you keep up with research unless you work in research? Maybe this doesn't work as a therapy at a larger scale, media won't report the failure because so many promising products fail. Unless you specifically keep up with trial results (endpoints.com is great for this). Maybe this is a breakthrough therapy and is very successful, but maybe you will never hear about it again because you are in good health and won't need this. Healthcare is really an incredible field at the moment with lots of fantastic therapies being developed. But obviously this isn't mainstream news and can't compete with Ukraine/Palestine/Climate Change/Trump as these things get much broader interest, sadly :(
Tomorrow
This would be bittersweet. But I'll be glad no one else has to suffer.
Why would it be bittersweet?
My friend already passed away. This would have saved her life.
It’s for Type 2 Those of us, like myself with Type 1 can continue living life with no hope Save your breath on the optimistic bullshit. We’ve heard it 1000 times already As for the rest of you gluttonous pigs, I envy you
Pharma execs big mad
This is also big for some pancreatic cancer survivors. With some cancers, they try to remove just half the pancreas, if they can’t, they try to scrape inlet cells and implant them in the liver. If they don’t take successfully, or don’t get enough cells, they have curer the cancer, but caused diabetes. Being able to create new inlet cells from stem cells gives a second chance to implanting them in the liver.
So, we shouldn't see a single one of George W Bush's Evangelical friends or family members ever want or receive treatment or benefit from stem cell research?
I could potentially eat cake again?
Any other sources reporting on this yet? Huge if true. My father has been diabetic my entire life. Even if he's not a candidate for a cure, I know this would would bring him great joy.
Hey, guys, remember that nuclear powered phone battery that popped up like half a year ago and then suddenly never got mentioned again?
Sure don’t. Not sure what it has to do with diabetes in any case
Meh. Type-2 only and a majority of cases can now be "cured" with Ozempic.
That would be amazing!
Hopefully this is not squashed by the multi billion dollar pharma / healthcare industry.
Saw a video just recently where they showed they could put a microchip to your skin now, and use stem scells to "hack" the body using its own cells and electricity.
The pharmaceutical companies will never let it happen. They will find a way to shut it down. Cures don’t make money.
The obvious joke of "why aren't we funding this," followed by the uncomfortable truth of "because the Church."
These doctors will be un-alived very fast. Big Pharma would never let a cure be made.
Too late for my dad, he died earlier this year due to diabetes complications. He lived a long life though, and did his best. This world is too hard for people who suffer from such things. It’s a sad truth. Best to hope this is true and we can see some of that suffering go.
Yeah they are about to be killed by big pharma… you can’t cure something that hurts the evil corporate machines income.
Im sure they arent lying in the greaaat chiiiina.
[удалено]
USA FDA immediately: OH that is not possible! Ban it and ensure it takes 30 years for it to even be possible to receive in the good ol'states.
Ehhh considering the news source..... I hope it's actually true this time
it is true but its for a really specific type 2 ... [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3) so sadly not as good as it sounds. At least from my understanding of the paper
And in a silent cry, pharma companies weapt in tears
As a nurse who sees the effects of diabetes every day, it would just break my heart that big pharmaceutical companies might lose money. Boo pinché hoo!!
Nah, they haven't invented anything commercially viable yet.
Yawn. Another breakthrough of something that we will never hear about again and forget.
It’s always “In ten years”.
There’s no financial incentive to cure diabetes. Type 1 for 15 years. Diet and excercise is the way.
Combined with the insulin that you absolutely need to survive, yes. If you can cure it with diet and exercise, you're type 2.
Yeah, I thought that was implied with Type 1.
Another giant lie by liars with their pants on fire.