Intestinal cells reprogramming to produce insulin and treat diabetes

Manipulating a single gene, human gastrointestinal cells can be converted into insulin producing cells and thus treat diabetes, one of the sanitary epidemics of the 21st century.

It is proposed by a team of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center of the University of Columbia (USA) that demonstrates, in principle, that a medicine could reschedule cells within the organism of a people with diabetes so that they produce insulin.

For years there has been talk of cell reprogramming as one of the roads to treat diabetes, explains the Domenico Accili researcher."But so far, an fully functional insulin producing cell had not been manufactured by handling a single gene."

According to this expert, the finding raises the possibility that the "ineffective" cells that there is a person with type 1 diabetes can be easily replaced through the reprogramming of the cells already existing in the patient himself, without the need for a need for aTransplant of new cells created from embryonic or adult stem cells.

Many teams work on the possibility of transforming patient cells, of any kind, insulin producing cells.

In type 1 diabetes, the organism's insulin producing cells are destroyed by the immune system and for decades researchers have been trying to replace cells with different mechanisms.And, although today insulin -producing cells are already manufactured in the laboratory from stem cells, they still do not have all the natural functions of the beta cells of the pancreas.

Therefore, many teams work on the possibility of transforming patient cells, of any kind, insulin producing cells.This same team had already shown that gastrointestinal mouse cells can be transformed into insulin producing cells;The current study, which is published in "Nature Communications", goes one step further and shows that this technique also works in human cells.

Columbia researchers were able to ‘teach’ human gastrointestinal cells to produce insulin in response to physiological circumstances by deactivating Fox1 genes.

Genetic Engineering

Accili and Ryotaro Bouchi first created a human intestine fabric model with human pluripotent stem cells.Through genetic engineering they deactivated any Fox1 gene activity within intestinal cells.And after seven days they saw that some of the intestinal cells began to produce insulin and, most importantly, only in response to glucose.

In their previous work in mice, researchers found that insulin produced by intestinal cells was released in the bloodstream, behaved like normal insulin and was able to normalize blood glucose levels in diabetic mice.This work, published in "Nature Genetics" has already been reproduced by another group of independent researchers, confirming the results.

Accili believes that demonstrating that human cells can respond in the same way that the mouse cells have cleared the main obstacle;"Now we can move forward to try to make this treatment a reality."And the key, he explains, will be to find a drug capable of inhibiting Fox1 in gastrointestinal cells of diabetes patients.