Insulin made from stem cells in research first
Stem cells taken from the umbilical cords of newborns can be engineered to produce insulin and may some day be used to treat diabetes, US and British researchers claim.
They say they were able to first grow large numbers of the stem cells and then direct them to resemble the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas that are damaged in diabetes.
“This discovery tells us that we have the potential to produce insulin from adult stem cells to help people with diabetes,” said Dr Randall Urban of the University of Texas’s Medical Branch at Galveston, who directed the study.
Writing in the journal Cell Proliferation, the researchers, who included a team at Britain’s University of Newcastle, say they hope to eventually produce an alternative to using controversial embryonic stem cells.