For patients with type 1 diabetes, their immune system attacks the pancreas, resulting in the loss of the patient the ability to regulate blood sugar. These patients must often pay close attention to their blood sugar levels, sometimes a day needs to be measured several times, by injection of insulin to control blood sugar in a healthy range. But it is difficult to achieve accurate blood glucose control, diabetes patients need to face the problem of long-term treatment.
Many scientists believe that the replacement of
pancreatic islet cells are damaged the patient is a better treatment with healthy islet cells, healthy islet cells can be properly regulate blood sugar and insulin release. This method has been used for some patients, but the main problems is that the patient's immune system will continue to attack the transplanted cells, so patients need long-term use of immunosuppressive drugs.
Recently, researchers from Children's Hospital Boston, USA MIT and other research units propose a new method for islet cell transplantation. They designed a new material capable of islet cell transplantation prior to the cells wrapped up, the researchers conducted experiments on mice, and the results show that these encapsulated human cells to treat diabetes, and the effect of up to six months at the same time does not cause the body to produce an immune response.
The authors, Professor Daniel Anderson says: "Although this research more research is needed to verify, but we believe that this method will be able to protect or type 1 diabetes patients with transplanted islet cells from the immune system attack, but can also the case without the help of medication the patient better control of blood sugar. "