Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease
characterized by destruction of insulin producing cells in the pancreas.
Current efforts to treat these patients with human islet transplantation in an
effort to restore insulin secretory function (obtained from human pancreas) are
limited severely by the small numbers of donated pancreas available each year
combined with the toxicity of immunosuppressive drug treatments required to
prevent graft rejection.
Pluripotent stem cells, instructed to
differentiate into a particular pancreatic cell called a beta cell, could
overcome the shortage of therapeutically effective material to transplant. They also afford the opportunity to engineer
such cells to effectively resist immune attack as well as graft rejection.
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