Replacements for some diabetics’ missing insulin-producing cells might be found in the patients’ own pancreases, a new study in mice suggests.
Alpha cells in the pancreas can spontaneously transform into insulin-producing beta cells, researchers from the University of Geneva in Switzerland report online in Nature April 4. The study, done in mice, is the first to reveal the pancreas’s ability to regenerate missing cells. Scientists were surprised to find that new beta cells arose from alpha cells in the pancreas, rather than stem cells.
If the discovery translates to people, scientists may one day be able to coax type 1 diabetics’ own alpha cells into replacing insulin-producing cells. Type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes, results when the immune system destroys beta cells in the pancreas. People with the disease must take lifelong injections of insulin in order to keep blood sugar levels from rising too high.
“The exciting discovery from this study is that alpha cells can spontaneously convert to beta cells without any interference from the researchers,” says Andrew Rakeman, the scientific program manager for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s beta cell therapies program. “It’s very early and very basic research right now, but it opens up the idea that reprogramming is not just something we have to force cells to do, that it’s an intrinsic property of the cells.”
Although the immune system continually wipes out beta cells in people with type 1 diabetes, some studies have found a small number of beta cells in the pancreases of people who have had the disease for years. Some researchers thought the cells could be ones that had somehow survived the immune system’s ongoing assault, but that “is very unlikely, because the immune system is very, very efficient,” says Pedro Herrera, a developmental biologist at the University of Geneva Medical School and a leader of the new study. So that suggested to Herrera and his colleagues that the pancreas was making new beta cells.