Diabetes Treatment
Diabetes Treatment
Introduction
Type 1 Diabetes mellitus, formerly known as insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus is a disease that is defied as a metabolism disorder. It affects about 5-10% of the diabetic population estimating to about 4.9 people worldwide. In this type of diabetes, the onset of elevated blood sugar levels usually begin abruptly in a fairly dramatic way before the age of 30 and about half of all the cases appear during childhood.
The cause of diabetes type 1 is an autoimmune destruction in which the immune system produces antibodies that attack the pancreatic £]-cells. Insulin in the body that serves to suppress glucose production in the liver and its release from storage depots into the bloodstream. Without insulin, glucose in the blood remains virtually useless and the bodies cells are deprived of fuel, despite an increase in blood sugar levels (Alterman, 2000).
The only possible type of treatment of Type 1 diabetes up until recently is taking daily insulin injections while constantly monitoring one¡¦s blood sugar level. The only permanent cure available for it is cell replacement therapy (Assady et. al., 2000). However, the lack of suitable donors opposed a major problem in accomplishing it. It wasn¡¦t until after the discovery of methods to isolate and grow human embryonic stem cells in 1998 by Professor James A. Thomson from the Univ. of Wisconsin that a feasible method came into view.
Embryonic stem cells are derived from the inner cells mass of one of the earliest stages in the development of the embryo, the stage when it is a blastocyst. Blastocysts have the potential to self-replicate and is pluripotent (can give rise to cells derived to form all three germ layers), thus being able to differentiate into insulin producing pancreatic cells. Since type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, the use of stem cells to restore those destroyed cells would be reasonable. The embryonic stem cells of working pancreatic islets cells are extracted from a rodent (due to controversial issues dealing with the use of human embryonic stem cells) and cultured on mediums until they differentiate. They are then implanted into a person or another rodent with diabetes so that they would function in-vivo to process the glucose like an actual pancreatic islet cell would.
Two Different Approaches to Stem Cell Differentiation
In order to successfully differentiate stem cells to replicate normal insulin...