An exciting new experimental treatment could help patients with Type 1 diabetes survive longer without insulin injections.
The treatment involves injecting stem cells into the blood of diabetes sufferers to replace their faulty immune systems -- essentially putting the disease on hold, according to scientists.
"This is the first time in the history of diabetes that patients have gone an interval ... requiring no insulin, no immune suppression, no medications at all," Dr. Richard Burt, chief of the Division of Immunotherapy for Autoimmune Diseases at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, told Â鶹´«Ã½.
Type 1 diabetes, also called juvenile diabetes, is much less common than Type 2 diabetes, which is linked with obesity and poor diet and typically affects adults. About 10 per cent of people with diabetes have Type 1.
Type 1 diabetes is usually diagnosed in childhood and is an autoimmune disease. It is caused by their own immune systems mistakenly destroying the islet cells in the pancreas that create insulin. The result is that almost all Type 1 patients must take insulin daily to control their blood sugar levels.
Dr. Burt and Dr. Julio Voltarelli of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil developed the therapy, working with 15 patients recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
They removed the patients' own stem cells from their blood, called hematopoietic stem cells, and froze them.
The patients then underwent chemotherapy for four days to weaken their immune systems. That way their bodies were more receptive when the doctors put the stem cells back in the patients.
The result was that the patients' immune systems effectively "re-set" themselves, and allowed 14 of the 15 to live for an average of two years without insulin or other medications to control their diabetes. One went for nearly three years without insulin.
"Ninety-three percent of patients achieved different periods of insulin independence and treatment-related toxicity was low, with no mortality," the researchers wrote in their report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The experiment failed in the first patient, Burt and Voltarelli reported. "We used steroids," Burt said. In the next 14, they left out the steroids.
"Ninety-three percent of patients achieved different periods of insulin independence and treatment-related toxicity was low, with no mortality," they wrote.
Burt believes the treatment re-sets the immune systems of the patients, stopping, at least temporarily, the onslaught on the pancreatic islet cells and allowing some of them to regenerate and produce insulin on their own.
"The insulin-producing cells in the pancreas regenerate," he said.
The researchers note that they have not tested this by looking at the pancreases of the patients, but say their clinical outcome suggest that the pancreatic cells have regenerated.
While they are not claiming to have cured the patients, the researchers said their experiment shows it may be possible to at least interrupt the mistaken immune response that causes Type-1 diabetes.
The study raises the question, however, of whether it's the chemotherapy or the stem cells that are putting the diabetes into remission.
Further, only patients who still have some functioning insulin producing cells were tested.
"This was a select group of people who have had diabetes for a very short duration," Dr. Bernard Zinman of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto told Â鶹´«Ã½. "These findings have no relevance to people who have had diabetes for some time."
The results, therefore, will remain experimental data, until researchers test this approach on more patients with early stage diabetes.
With a report from CTV's medical specialist Avis Favaro and medical producer Elizabeth St. Philip
