Stories about: diabetes

Transfusing engineered red blood cells to protect against autoimmune disease

Posted on by Kat J. McAlpine
Posted in Science, Therapeutics
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Red blood cells, pictured here, could be engineered to protect against autoimmune disease
Transfusions of engineered red blood cells could help prevent and/or treat autoimmune disease.

Autoimmune disease is usually treated using general immunosuppressants. But this non-targeted therapy leaves the body more susceptible to infection and other life-threatening diseases.

Now, scientists at Boston Children’s Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research think they may have found a targeted way to protect the body from autoimmune disease. Their approach, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses transfusions of engineered red blood cells to re-train the immune system. Early experiments in mice have already shown that the approach can prevent — and even reverse — clinical signs of two autoimmune diseases: a multiple-sclerosis (MS)-like condition and Type 1 diabetes. …

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Potential cure for diabetes may be in the stomach

Posted on by Trisha Gura
Posted in Science, Therapeutics
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diabetes stomach beta cells
The yellow-green cells in this “mini-stomach” are capable of making insulin. The mini-organ was made from biopsied cells from mouse stomachs, with reprogramming factors added.

If only there were a cure. David Breault, MD, PhD, associate chief of the Division of Endocrinology at Boston Children’s Hospital, was seeing patient after patient with Type I diabetes. Children facing lifetimes of insulin injections, special diets and the threat of long-term complications including blindness, heart disease and kidney failure.

Breault knew that patients with type I diabetes mysteriously destroy their own insulin-producing beta cells. He had read reports of researchers transplanting beta cells to supplement insulin. These transplants, even when successful, required powerful immunosuppressant medications to prevent patients’ immune systems from attacking the donor cells.

But Breault was also aware that investigators had, for a decade, been looking to stem cells as the source of a constantly renewing supply of beta cells. Advancing that promise, he has now found a way to convert patients’ own cells — from the stomach and intestine — into beta cells that produce insulin. …

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News notes: Headlines in science & innovation

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Devices, Science, Therapeutics
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An occasional roundup of news items Vector finds interesting.

Blood-brain barrier on chip

vector news - blood brain barrier chip
(Wyss Institute at Harvard University)

The blood-brain barrier protects the brain against potentially damaging molecules, but its gate-keeping can also prevent helpful drugs from getting into the central nervous system. Reporting in PLoS One, a team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering describes a 3-D blood-brain barrier on a chip — a hollow blood vessel lined with living human endothelial cells and surrounded by a collagen matrix bearing human pericytes and astrocytes. …

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Could Burmese pythons shed light on diabetes?

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Science
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Burmese pythons diabetes

Originally from Southeast Asia, Burmese pythons are perhaps best known in the U.S. for the havoc they’ve been creating in the Everglades. Kept as pets and released into the wild, they can grow to nearly 20 feet long, and are hunting animals like marsh rabbits toward extinction (a problem Florida is trying to address with an annual Python Removal Competition).

But in the lab, at a diminutive 3 feet in length, Burmese pythons may hold valuable lessons about diabetes. …

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Rescuing intestinal stem cells from attack in diabetes

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Science, Therapeutics
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diabetic enteropathy and colonic stem cells
Blood levels of the hormone IGFBP3 (enterostaminine), shown here in green, are markedly elevated in people with longstanding type 1 diabetes and launch a lethal attack on intestinal stem cells. Adding a protein that soaks up the excess hormone restores normal stem cell function and could help prevent or treat diabetic enteropathy. (All images by Riseon)

Up to 80 percent of people with long-standing type 1 diabetes develop gastrointestinal symptoms—abdominal pain, bloating, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation and fecal incontinence—that severely diminish quality of life. Recent evidence suggests that this condition, known as diabetic enteropathy, results from damage to the intestinal lining, but the details beyond that have been unclear.

A study in this week’s Cell Stem Cell, led by Paolo Fiorina, MD, PhD, now provides some answers. It demonstrates how diabetes can lead to destruction of the stem cells that maintain the intestinal lining, and identifies a potential drug that could protect these stem cells and prevent or treat diabetic enteropathy. …

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How our neutrophils might sabotage wound healing in diabetes

Posted on by Tom Ulrich
Posted in Science
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When you get a cut or a scrape, your body jumps into action, mobilizing a complicated array of cells and factors to stem bleeding, keep the wound bacteria-free and launch the healing process.

For most of us, that process is complete in a couple of weeks. But for many people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, delayed wound healing can have permanent consequences. For example, between 15 and 25 percent of diabetes patients develop chronic foot ulcers. Those ulcers are the root cause of roughly two-thirds of lower limb amputations related to diabetes.

Why don’t these wounds close? Blame a perfect storm of diabetic complications, such as reduced blood flow, neuropathy and impaired signaling between cells. According to research by Denisa Wagner, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, a poorly understood feature of our immune system’s neutrophils may be one more ingredient in the storm.

…

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A skin cream for peripheral neuropathy? Small molecule may go a long way

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Therapeutics
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The footpads of diabetic mice (line-D) treated with a cream containing XIB4035 have increased numbers of nerve terminals (shown in green in the lower right panel), whereas mice given a control cream (lower left) do not. The top two panels represent healthy “wild type” mice.
The footpads of diabetic mice given a cream containing XIB4035 (lower right) have new nerve terminals (shown in green), whereas mice given a control cream (lower left) do not. The top two panels represent healthy “wild type” mice.
About half of people with diabetes develop peripheral neuropathy. The most common form, small-fiber neuropathy, generally starts in the feet, causing pain, odd sensations like pricks and “pins and needles,” and—the most worrisome feature—a loss of sensation that can increase the chance of ulcers and infections.

In some cases, that may lead to the need for amputation—as happened with my diabetic great-grandfather whose numbed feet, unbeknownst to him, got too close to the fire.

While there are some treatments to reduce pain, there’s nothing that restores sensation. Nor do any existing treatments address the underlying cause of the neuropathy: the degeneration or dysfunction of the endings of the sensory neurons in the skin. …

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Out of the fire, into the pan: Lessons on managing chronic care in developing countries

Posted on by Kipaya Kapiga
Posted in Pediatrics
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Food insecurity is a major problem for diabetic patients at the Kay Mackensen clinic in Haiti where Julia Von Oettingen, MD (top center) serves as medical director.
Food insecurity is a major problem for diabetic patients at the Kay Mackensen clinic in Haiti where Julia Von Oettingen, MD (top center) serves as medical director.
In parts of the developing world, especially remote, rural areas, it’s not unusual for people with diabetes to ignore their symptoms until they’ve collapsed and need immediate care. By the time they see a doctor, their blood sugar levels might be so high as to cause diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), where the body starts breaking down fats and proteins, turning their blood acidic and leaving them extremely dehydrated.

For many, it won’t be the first such episode. But for some, it can be the last.

Stories like this are increasingly common across large swaths of the developing world—as Diane Stafford, MD, an endocrinologist from Boston Children’s Hospital, discovered when she traveled to Kigali, Rwanda, through the Human Resources for Health program. …

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Can we bypass the bypass to treat diabetes?

Posted on by Andrea Mooney
Posted in Science, Therapeutics
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Diagram of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass
Gastric bypass surgery creates a small pouch in the stomach and connects it directly to the small intestine. Why does it help type 2 diabetes? (Wikimedia Commons)

Research shows that gastric bypass surgery, aside from inducing weight loss, resolves type 2 diabetes. Though weight loss and improved diabetes often go hand-in-hand, patients who undergo gastric bypass usually end up seeing an improvement in their type 2 diabetes even before they lose weight.

But why? To investigate, a research team led by Nicholas Stylopoulos, MD, of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Division of Endocrinology, spent a year studying rats and observed that after gastric bypass surgery, the way in which the small intestine processes glucose changes. They saw the intestine using and disposing of glucose, and showed that it thereby regulates blood glucose levels in the rest of the body, helping to resolve type 2 diabetes.

Basically, as the team reported recently in Science, the small intestine—widely believed to be a passive organ—is actually a major contributor to the body’s metabolism. …

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Silencing immune attacks in type 1 diabetes

Posted on by Tripp Underwood
Posted in Pediatrics, Therapeutics
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Could diabetes be treated without insulin shots? (Tess Watson/Flickr)
Could diabetes be treated without insulin shots? (Tess Watson/Flickr)

For decades, patients have managed their type 1 diabetes by injecting themselves with insulin to regulate the glucose in their blood. While this form of medical management addresses the immediate danger of low insulin levels, long-term complications associated with diabetes, like heart and kidney diseases, still threaten more than 215,000 children currently living with the disease in the United States.

“Insulin injections can manage hyperglycemia by reducing the patient’s glucose levels, but it is not the cure,” says Paolo Fiorina, MD, PhD, of the Nephrology Division at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Fiorina is currently involved in new research targeting a molecular pathway that triggers diabetes in the first place—potentially providing a permanent cure. It could potentially change the face of diabetes treatment in children. …

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