Diabetes and Stem Cell Research

April 24, 2008

by Julia Hanf

Stem cell research is an area that is quite controversial. Controversy in the wake of stem cell research and the fine distinctions of universal health care are a few of the subjects explored by health policy authorities and those living with life-changing illnesses such as diabetes and migraine. The largest issue involved, being where these cells originate from. The sources of stem cells are various. They can come from adults, the blood from the umbilical cord, and embryos.

Diabetes treatments and cure depend on the results of the research on stem cells. The American Diabetes Association has been very supportive on these researches and has been cooperating by means of financial support. Recently, there have been many protests on the researches done in stem cells and the American Diabetes Association has tried its best to eliminate and stop these protests.

UC Berkeley and Stanford University are two institutions that are coming together on a venture to support collaboration among scientists who perform stem cell research.

Doctors, biologists, chemists, engineers and computer scientists from the two schools formerly cited, are joining forces to talk about their effort and to contributions with students and staff.

Both universities are deeply caught up in embryonic stem cell research, which scientists anticipate will provide treatments or cures for such diseases as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

To represent the teamwork, Stanford and UC Berkeley plan to build separate laboratories for researches who constantly visit the campuses and especially for those who spend their time off with friends and colleagues from other universities.

A biotechnology company, VistaGen Therapeutics, Inc., utilizes embryonic stem cell technologies to find and develop new drugs for diabetes, announced an expansive embryonic stem cell research union with Toronto’s University Health Network, Canada’s leading research hospital, and its stem cell research colleague, the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine.

The fresh union places VistaGen to be able to continue to utilize the embryonic stem cell biology information and innovative embryonic stem cell know-how of Dr. Gordon Keller, one of the world’s foremost stem cell researchers and the Director of the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine. VistaGen and Dr. Keller look forward to carrying out research into advanced techniques to differentiate between embryonic stem cells into mature cardiac, liver, and pancreatic beta-islet cells. This will progress VistaGen’s industry-leading, in vitro biological systems and bioinformatics databases for prognostic toxicology submissions.

This research program can be seen on the licenses of Dr. Keller which were provided by VistaGen. These licenses were given for the intellectual property of the former embryonic stem cell. These also include research and findings about the recent embryonic stem cells.

VistaGen also is hoping to use the results of this research to develop the next generation of its adapted embryonic stem cell-based heart, liver and pancreatic beta-islet cell differentiation systems for discovering innovative drugs to treat heart disease, liver disease and diabetes.

Spring Point Project, a different group of researcher as also exerted efforts to give treatments by using injectables. These injectables contain insulin-producing islet cells that were taken from pigs. According to these researches, healthy human islet cells in patients suffering from diabetes could reverse the symptoms of the disease as well as its effects and complications. However, the group could not proceed with this because access to human donor organs is restricted to the number of cells gathered.

Dr. Bernhard Hering, a world-renowned diabetes authority and scientific director of the Diabetes Institute for Immunology and Transplantation at the University of Minnesota, and his team ran test with pig islet cell transplants on monkeys and revealed that those cell transplants resulted in long-term diabetes reversal in the monkeys. A PowerPoint presentation incorporated a chart that showed unpredictable blood sugar counts in the monkeys achieving a level point. The application of pig parts in humans has been showing success in other areas, involving pig valves or bowels in transplants. Pig skin is already utilized in burn centers to replace human skin.

Due to the fact that this is introducing foreign cells into a body, those receiving the transplants would have to take medication to make sure they did not reject the cells. There could be side effects, but at this time, it is unknown how serious they could be, and the side effects could vary from patient to patient.

Sometime in the near future, possibly as early as 2009, the first clinical experiments will be scheduled for those with the most severe form of diabetes who are not capable of monitoring their blood sugar levels and can experience sudden blackouts or other episodes.

Stem cell research will continue to be controversial for some time as long as the sources of the cells remain the same as they are today. If the stem cells can be derived from a source that the public is comfortable with, the controversy may decline.

About the Author:

Julia Hanf author of the book How To Play the Diabetes Diet Game and Win Through a real life crisis Julia figured out how to live diabetes free. Visit http://www.yourdiabetescure.com and learn more about your solution for diabetes.

Article Source: http://www.ezineonair.com

Share and Enjoy: