Thursday, October 07, 2010
Surgeons Create Functional Artificial Pancreatic Tissue
From American College of Surgeons (ACS)
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston are working on an entirely new treatment for diabetes to replace daily insulin injections.
They have bio-engineered a novel matrix that serves as a scaffold for seeding supportive stem cells as well as pancreatic islets (the cells that produce insulin in the pancreas).
The matrix was formed by removing cells from pancreatic tissue with biological deter-gents so only the proteins that hold the cells together were left. The resulting matrix was seeded with donor islet cells and supportive stem cells, and the entire construct was successfully trans-planted and maintained in a recipient animal model using microsurgical techniques.
Although the research is still at an early stage, Dr. Claudius Conrad, MD, PhD, primary investigator and chief resident in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital believes a clinical trial of in patients with insulin dependent diabetes is likely in the near future. “The difficult aspects of the concept, such as decellularizing the pancreas by means of detergents, subsequent cellular seeding, and transplantation, have been worked out. I am very excited about the prospect of bioengineering an endocrine pancreas that could cure patients with insulin dependent diabetes. I think we are very close to the clinical application of this entirely novel concept,” he said.
Read the full article here.
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