From BioMed Israel Week 2010:

A Novel Therapeutic Method Based on the Ability of Stem Cells to Assist in Treating Juvenile Diabetes Will Replace the Insulin Injection

Ramot, Tel Aviv University’s technology transfer company, will present for the first time a therapeutic approach based on stem cells capability to assist in the treatment of juvenile diabetes, in the Israel BioMed Week 2010, which will be held on the 14^th-16^th of June in Tel Aviv. The main novelty of the treatment is a breakthrough technology which demonstrates how human beta cells, which manufacture insulin, can be grown in a culture. Lab experiments have already proven that the cells can manufacture and keep up normal cells of insulin. This technology thus has the potential to produce insulin-producing cells for transplantation.

The person behind this advancement is Prof. Shimon Efrat from the faculty of Medicine in Tel Aviv University and one of the world-leading researchers in the field of diabetes. “One of the main indicators of juvenile diabetes is a sharp decrease in the number of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas,” says Prof. Efrat. “So far they could not have been regenerated, and the patients needed to balance the glucose levels in the blood by constant insulin injection. In extreme cases, a pancreas transplant was required. Transplants, however, are not a simple solution: there are few organ donors, and there is an ever-present danger that the body would reject the implant.”

In the course of the research, Prof. Efrat has developed a method by which beta cells from the human pancreas can be ‘marked’ and tracked. Using this method, Prof. Efrat managed to track their differentiation and proliferation processes, and also succeeded in isolating them from the general population of the cells and obtain a pure culture. In the course of following the cellular life cycle, Prof. Efrat has found conditions in which the beta cells grow in a culture and secrete insulin, and thus could be used to create a vast source of human, insulin secreting cells, for transplantation in diabetes patients.

The commercial potential of the technology is extremely diverse, and includes several possible directions, such as development of the cells themselves as a treatment for diabetes by a specialized company, and using the cells by various companies as a tool for the development of therapeutics against diabetes. This field recently saw light in the prestigious journal Nature, which described a valuable deal of $20 million between Roche and Harvard University for the use of stem cells for the scanning of materials in the drug development process.

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