In people with type 1 diabetes, the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas don’t function properly. Daily injections or infusions of insulin are necessary to regulate energy-producing glucose absorption in all the body’s cells.
Doctors know how to implant type 1 patients with donor islets full of healthy beta cells, but they cannot keep the transplanted cells from failing within a matter of days. Unfortunately, half of all transplanted patients are back on insulin injections one year later, and 90 percent revert to insulin dependency within five years.
Israeli biotech company Betalin Therapeutics is developing an engineered micro-pancreas (EMP) that can sustain significant levels of glucose-regulated insulin secretion from transplanted beta cells.
If this tissue-engineering breakthrough proves effective in human trials, it has the potential to cure, rather than only control, type 1 and even severe forms of type 2 diabetes.
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