Taking the spike out of diabetes
Allied with BetaLogics (a subsidiary of Janssen Research & Development LLC), the UBC Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences and Professor Timothy Kieffer discovered that Type 2 diabetes in mice can be effectively treated with a combination of specially cultured stem cells and conventional diabetes drugs.
After the pancreatic-like stem-cell implant and then treated with a standard diabetes drug, the mice became ‘glucose tolerant’, effectively shrugging off the damaging ‘spikes’ in blood sugar levels and essentially negating the disease’s effects.
The UBC/BetaLogics team is now looking to see if larger implants of these ‘progenitor’ cells can achieve the same results without the supplementary drugs.
The results were published in the open-access forum Stem Cell Reports.
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VancouverType 2 diabetes can be effectively treated with a combination of specially-cultured stem cells and conventional diabetes drugs.