An American team has succeeded in transforming skin cells into insulin-producing cells. To do this, they reproduced the cloning techniques developed in 1986.
Cloning stem cells to cure type 1 diabetes, this ambitious goal could one day become a reality. The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) and Columbia University (New York, USA) have been working on this for several years. This April 28, in Nature, the team reports the success of a technique inspired by cloning.
Reprogram cells
NYSCF researchers tested their method for treating type 1 diabetes. The goal: to transform skin cells from a patient into insulin-producing beta cells. Type 1 diabetes is indeed characterized by a deficiency of these cells. Researchers are therefore trying to teach the body how to produce it on its own. For this, they used these skin cells and transplanted their nucleus into human oocytes. This enabled them to obtain human embryonic stem cells.
The advantage of these cells is that they are “pluripotent”, that is to say that they can transform into any cell in the human body. The team therefore succeeded in turning them into insulin-producing beta cells. “From the beginning, the goal of this work has been to create stem cells specific to adult patients with type 1 diabetes, which can create the cells destroyed by the disease. By reprogramming cells to a pluripotent state, and creating beta cells, we have taken a further step towards treating diabetic patients with their own insulin-producing cells, ”said Dieter Egli, who led the study.
Ethical debates
“Today’s results give hope that we will one day have a cure for this debilitating disease,” said David McKeon, spokesperson for the NYSCF. And this is not the only treatment for the disease that arouses enthusiasm: it is also the fact that the technique uses the body’s resources, and does not pose any DNA problem. The approach is however debated. The use of human embryos is already a problem, as it often leads to their destruction. The NYSCF team solved this problem: they use a technique used during the first animal cloning, in 1986, which gave birth to the sheep Dolly. But the cloning itself raises ethical reservations. “The repeated cloning of embryos, and the generation of stem cells from adult cells, increase the risk of production of human embryos for treatments intended for certain specific individuals”, anticipates Insoo Hyun, specialist in bioethics, in a commentary associated with the study.
These concerns do not prevent researchers from looking to the future. They envision the extension of this technique to other cell therapies, against various diseases in which the body triggers an immune reaction against its own beta cells. It could therefore be adapted to the treatment of Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis, but also AMD or repair of injured bones.
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