New hope for diabetics

2000/08/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Osasuna

About 75 years ago diabetics could only wait to die. Today things have changed a lot and the quality of life of diabetics is much better. However, diabetes (need to take care of food, injections, etc. ), especially type 1 diabetes (caused by lack of insulin or lack of insulin), is quite active.

As techniques improve, on the one hand, gene therapy has been tested in recent years. The PDX-1 protein is the one that produces the area and produces insulin production. Therefore, mice in the laboratory with diabetes have been injected with the adene virus that encodes this protein in the liver. According to the hypothesis, once the virus enters the cells and its genes bind to the cell genes, the cells would produce the PDX-1 protein while producing insulin. And so it happened. About 48 hours after adenobirus injection, mice began producing insulin and blood glucose levels were reduced to normal. About 60% of liver cells began to work as if they were area cells.

On the other hand, the improvement of these techniques has been accompanied by human trials. One of the last is a transplant performed on seven patients. All of them had type 1 diabetes and were transplanted to the islands of Langerhans in the area along with immunodeficiency without glucocorticoids (in transplants it is necessary to cause immunodeficiency to avoid rejections). In the 267 area transplants performed prior to this trial, other immunodeficiency products were used and only 8.2% of patients were able to remain without external insulin for more than a year. On this occasion, after an average follow-up of 11.9 months, in general, they have not needed external insulin. A patient has needed four times the external insulin on many other occasions. Another patient has needed external insulin (7U) for two days of illness. In the rest there have been no remarkable problems. Therefore, it seems that the way of transplants to deal with type 1 diabetes continues, although more tests and tests still need to be done.