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insulin from sperm.
One more step in the constant advance of regenerative medicine.Thus, the finding that has just been presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology (held in Philadelphia, USA) could be defined.A group of American scientists has managed to transform stem cells present into the testicles into insulin producing cells and successfully transplant them to 'diabetic' mice.
It would be easy to throw the bells on the fly and think that the testicles hide the key to treating millions of patients with type 1 diabetes who need to injject insulin daily to alleviate their natural deficit of this hormone.However, it is still early to think about the clinical application of this discovery, which will still have to go through several phases of verification and verification before making the leap to rehearsals with humans.
At the moment, however, its results are encouraging.Ian Gallicano and his team, from the University of Georgetown (USA), took a small spermatogonial cell sample of the testicles of several bodies of organ donors and cultivated them in the laboratory taking advantage of their pluripotential capacity, which allows them to become any tissue of the tissue of thebody.
From a single gram, as the British newspaper 'The Guardian' recounts, they were able to obtain up to one million stem cells with markers that indicated that they had successfully transformed into beta cells (the units of the pancreas that normally synthesize and secreteinsulin).
To finish demonstrating that the transformation between both types of cells had worked, the researchers transplanted the beta cells obtained from sperm to several diabetic mice (which had previously 'deactivated' the immune system to avoid rejection).For a week, pancreatic cells managed to produce insulin reducing blood sugar levels of rodents.
Until now, the body's pancreatic islet transplant is one of the most studied alternatives as an alternative to the insulin injections needed by patients with type 1 diabetes. However, the shortage of donations and the problem of rejection by the receiver havestop their generalization.
As the Gallicano doctor recognized, stem cell research capable of generating insulin (either from embryos or other adult tissues) is another of the roads in research;although to date no work had managed to implement them successfully to generate insulin.
The use of the stem cells of the testicles of male diabetic patients would solve on the one hand the rejection problems that may arise when there is a donor in between, the researchers clarify.On the other hand, they suggest, it could be possible that this same recipe will work in the case of women taking the stem cells directly from their oocytes (precursors of the ovules) to transform them into beta cells.
Type 1 diabetes (also known as juvenile infant because it affects mainly people under 40) represents between 5% and 10% of all cases of diabetes in the world.