Word: beta
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...some type of immune reaction gone awry - immune cells are "trained" in the thymus gland to recognize the body's own cells and protect them from destruction. For some reason, this education doesn't occur properly in Type 1 diabetes patients, and the immune system sees the pancreatic beta cells as foreign. Melton's team is currently working to generate thymus cells from diabetic patients in the same way the team created the beta cells, in order to put all the players together in a lab dish, in a kind of biological diorama of the disease. (See more from TIME...
...researchers are hoping to learn whether diabetes begins in the thymus or in the pancreas, where beta cells somehow change and are no longer recognized or protected by the immune system. "We still really don't know the mechanism of what causes this disease," says Melton. "We don't know which cell is initially responsible, and we don't know if certain people are destined to get it, or if there are things we can do to prevent it, or how to reverse...
That may soon change, if the beta cells Melton created can give scientists a full picture of the disease. If, for example, it turns out that the new beta cells can be made to survive the attack by the immune system, then the next step would be to return the functional beta cells, generated through strategies like the one used by Melton, back into the patients from whom the original skin cells came. But even that won't happen until more testing is done on the cells to ensure they are both safe and effective...
...these methods of making beta cells become more established, says Dr. Rohit Kulkarni, a diabetes expert at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, the strategy could be expanded to help patients with either Type 1 or 2 diabetes. "It might even be more relevant for other types of diabetes where there is no immune-system attack," he says. In those cases, simply replacing nonfunctioning beta cells might go a long way toward treating or even curing the disease. (See how to prevent illness...
...before that can happen, says Melton, the newly formed beta cells can become a valuable resource for understanding Type 1 diabetes better - to answer key questions such as what makes the cells so ineffective in diabetics, and whether new populations of beta cells could survive and function if transplanted into patients. "This is opening a door to a long-term project to get at the cause of this disease," he says. "But it is a new door...