University of Miami researchers announced this week they may have found a cure for diabetes that has already reversed the course of the disease in some patients and allowed them to live without insulin.
The possible cure for a disease that kills 162,000 Americans every year involves a combination of pancreas islet cell and bone marrow transplantation, the researchers said."This is a staging for what has been in my experience . . . the most important major step forward," Dr. Daniel Mintz, scientific director of the University of Miami Diabetes Research Institute, told a news conference Wednesday. " opens up the reality that this disease can be reversed, and permanently reversed," he said.
Insulin has prolonged the lives of diabetics since the 1920s, but it has not stopped blindness, kidney failure and other complications, leaving researchers struggling for a true cure for the disease, which consumes some $120 billion of health-care resources annually worldwide.
Researchers in various studies began experimenting with pancreas islet cell transplantation about 10 years ago. Since 1990, about half of 50 patients that have undergone the treatment have shown sustained, marked improvement, as the new cells cut patients' reliance on insulin, better controlling their blood sugar levels to reduce the risks of complications.
But the treatment has had problems, notably the transplant patients' need to spend a lifetime taking powerful drugs to fight their bodies' natural tendency to reject the cells.
As a result, islet cell treatments have been limited to diabetics already undergoing transplantation of organs damaged by the disease. But many of those patients' transplanted cells worked so well they found they no longer need insulin to control the disease, said Dr. Camillo Ricordi, chief of cellular transplantation at the Miami institute.
Ricordi said the Miami team had achieved enough success with cell transplantation that they were beginning a pilot study involving diabetic patients who were not in need of transplanted organs, broadening the base of people who can be helped by the process.
The researchers said they hoped the study would show that transplanted islet cells, combined with bone marrow, would allow patients to function without insulin and without anti-rejection drugs, eventually curing diabetes.
"These results . . . are encouraging enough to begin the first trial of islet transplantation alone," Ricordi said.