The World of Medical Advances

[Stragomagus]

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22465/

 

 

 

[hide=]Patients who underwent a procedure to wipe out the immune system and reconstitute it with their own stem cells remained insulin injection-free for up to three to four years after the procedure, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The research provides further evidence that a stem-cell transplant can reverse type 1 diabetes in some patients. Although a stem-cell transplant is a drastic procedure with a risk of serious side effects, this represents the most successful treatment to reverse the disease in humans without the need for ongoing medication.

 

 

 

The report extends research published in 2007 showing that the majority of 15 patients who underwent a blood stem-cell transplant were able to remain insulin-free for more than 18 months. Richard Burt, a coauthor of the study and a specialist in autoimmune disease at Northwestern University, says that "the criticism of the prior study was that maybe this was some kind of extended honeymoon"; he's referring to a phenomenon in which patients newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes will see their symptoms improve temporarily as they make health changes. This latest study extends the treatment to an additional five patients and shows that most patients have been able to remain off insulin for a longer period of time. In addition, it shows that patients have increased levels of a biological indicator of insulin secretion--evidence that they are indeed producing insulin on their own.

 

 

 

Type 1 diabetes is a chronic disease in which the immune system attacks the insulin-secreting beta cells in the pancreas; the body eventually fails to produce enough insulin to control blood-sugar levels. Because this form of diabetes is an autoimmune disease, scientists have been looking for ways to stop the immune system's destructive actions. One idea is to "reset" the patient's immune system by wiping it out with drugs and then rebuild it with the patient's own stem cells. Blood or hematopoietic stem cells reside in the bone marrow and are responsible for replenishing blood and immune-system cells. Hematopoietic stem-cell transplant is most often used to treat patients with cancers like leukemia and other diseases of the blood, but it has recently been investigated as a way to treat several autoimmune diseases, including diabetes and lupus.

 

 

 

In this study, which was based at the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil, patients first underwent drug treatments to boost their blood stem-cell production, making it possible to harvest stem cells from the blood rather than from the bone marrow. The patients were then hospitalized and given chemotherapy that severely impaired their immune systems; they simultaneously received drugs to prevent infections. The stem cells were purified from the blood and then injected back into the patients, where they could travel to the bone marrow and rebuild the immune system.

 

 

 

Twenty of 23 patients were able to go off insulin treatment for an average of 31 months; 12 of those have maintained this state, while 8 relapsed and began taking low doses of insulin. The researchers also measured levels of C-peptide, a by-product of insulin production that is used as an indicator of how much insulin is being manufactured in the pancreas. Burt explains that even on a "honeymoon" period, C-peptide levels will decrease in diabetics, but for patients in this study, "C-peptide levels kept going up and hit their maximum at two to three years."

 

 

 

A stem-cell transplant would only be effective in newly diagnosed patients who still have some beta cells left to preserve. Some patients have also achieved insulin independence with an experimental treatment that involves transplanting insulin-secreting cells from a donor. However, these patients require immunosuppressive drugs to keep their immune systems from rejecting the donor cells. "This is the first treatment that, after one treatment, patients are on no insulin and require no medications," Burt says.

 

 

 

Gordon Weir, head of islet transplantation at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, says that the results are impressive and that the treatment is "clearly having some effect on the natural course of the type 1 diabetes," but it's still too soon to declare this a permanent cure. Furthermore, he says that excitement about the results should be tempered by concerns about the potential dangers of the treatment and confusion about how the stem-cell transplant is actually working. In this study, two patients developed pneumonia because of the treatment; three others later experienced hormonal disorders, and nine patients developed a sperm deficiency.

 

 

 

Weir points out that the treatment regimen involved many drugs--including powerful chemotherapy agents--which may also have affected the diabetes. "We don't actually know the stem cells had anything to do with this result," he says. Weir hopes that the trial will spur further studies on the role of the stem cells and ways to make the treatment safer. Burt and his colleagues are now awaiting FDA approval for a randomized trial that would provide more rigorous data about the benefit of this treatment for diabetes.[/hide]

 

 

 

Alot to read, but it seems diabetes will be on its way out in the next 20 years

[Robert_de_Sable]

Good news, I suppose. Probably less than twenty years, though...

[champion]

Interesting. My dad has type 1 diabetes. Too bad it won't be mainstream for a while, though.

[The Observer]

Now this is something that is quite interesting. I hope they find a cure, because I know so many people who have it.

[Diesel]

My school recently had a genetics update conference, and this was one of the topics we covered. I was supposed to be taking notes during the presentation, but by the time he mentioned this cure, I was so awestruck that I stopped and proceeded to stare open-mouthed for 15 minutes as he explained this cure and future cures for diseases like Parkinson's and many others as well.

 

 

 

It's truly amazing at how far stem cell research came during the Bush administration. With his ban on funding embryonic stem cell, researchers had to find another way to harvest them. Luckily, the way that they found was a huge doorway of discovery. The man from the conference explained how Obama's reversal of the law will have little to no effect on the industry because everyone is racing to discover as much as they can from this new method.

 

 

 

We can chalk this down as one good thing that Bush did under his administration. :lol:

 

 

 

Anyways, look for more cures like this in the future. The progress that we've made in the past few years is mind-blowing.

[Stragomagus]

Anyways, look for more cures like this in the future. The progress that we've made in the past few years is mind-blowing.

 

 

 

Read the mit technology review as it has stuff like this every other day.

[Nom]

Having attended the same conference as Diesel I also knew something about this. I was under the impression that the idea was to grow the beta cells themselves from the stem cells and replace the destroyed ones. But I guess that wouldn't solve the problem of the immune system attacking them. So this works too.

[mmmcannibalism]

awesome, good to see what science can/will do.

[warri0r45]

Stem cell therapies have come a long way over the past few years, especially adult stem cell therapies like this.

 

 

 

Diesel is right. Bans on embryonic stem cell research have made adult stem cells a big thing, and that's lead to a lot of therapies and great steps forward with reverting adult stem cells to an embryonic-like state.

[Hawks]

So what's to keep the T-cells from attacking your beta cells again and you being rediagnosed with diabetes? I have type 1 and I honestly don't think this is the way to go. My brain's not working properly at the moment though and I can't remember my alternate suggestion.

[BlackDawn]

Why do I feel like we will be putting the TZDF's plan into action?

[Joes_So_Cool]

 

Alot to read, but it seems diabetes will be on its way out in the next 20 years

 

 

 

To bad my grandma will be on its way out in the next 20 months.

[Powman3]

Awesome, glad to see we still made progress even with that plant in office (get it??).

[Da_Latios]

Sweet; an excuse to stuff myself full of choccies!

[Stragomagus]

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+century+of+medical+miracles-a011768231

 

 

 

The article in this link details a good majority of the advances in medical and biological technology over the past 100 years or so.

 

(I'd have copied it into this post, but the article had the copy function disabled)

 

 

 

Also changed the title of the thread to "The World of Medical Advances".

 

 

 

With the way computer technology is advancing expect to see the amount of advances in the medical and biology field to dwarf those of the twentieth century.

[Stragomagus]

This is the good kind of necromancy.

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24020/page1/

 

Page 1

[hide]Scientists have long known that the human immune system has a method for detecting and destroying precancerous cells. But finding the cells behind this defense mechanism in order to study and perhaps even mimic them has proved quite the challenge. Since the malignant precancerous cells are eradicated before we even know they exist, identifying the cells that killed them seemed nearly impossible. Now European researchers have built a microfluidic biosensor that traps single immune cells together with single tumor cells, allowing the researchers to pick the most potent of these cancer killers out of a crowded field.

 

The project, called Cell On CHIp bioSEnsor (COCHISE), was initiated by microsystems engineer Roberto Guerrieri at the University of Bologna, Italy. Guerrieri noticed that immunologists had no way to identify and isolate those rare immune cells, or lymphocytes, with antitumor properties--only about one in every 1,000 immune cells has such properties.

 

Together with postdoctoral researcher Massimo Bocchi, Guerrieri created a microfluidics platform with an array of 1,536 microwells. In each well, electric fields force contact between a fluorescently labeled tumor cell and a labeled immune cell. An automated system then scans the array and detects wells in which the tumor cell's color has disappeared, thereby identifying the lymphocytes that are likely most effective against the leukemia and lymphoma cancers they tested.

 

The researchers then collect the individual cells that have triumphed over the tumor cells andprovide them to immunologists for study and propagation. "Analyzing a cell we know is active is a large step for research, because you can correlate expression of cytokines or gene expression," Bocchi says. "You can then identify genetic properties that are probably responsible for the cell being active against the tumor." He notes that this could one day be used to find new drugs to fight the disease.

 

Guerrieri and his colleagues are also working to clone entire cell lines from these single, potent lymphocytes. They plan to see if the resulting daughter cells maintain the same anticancer properties. If so, such an approach could be useful for developing cancer vaccines based on a transplant of a patient's own lymphocytes, the researchers say.

 

Story continues below

 

As far as the biosensor is concerned, "the design itself is not really new," says Luke Lee, director of the Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center at the University of California at Berkeley. Others have developed similar designs, although Lee notes that none are as user-friendly as the COCHISE system. Unlike the other devices, Lee says, the biosensor devised by Guerrieri and Bocchi and their collaborators offers a way to cleanly deliver cells to the chip and manipulate them. "Most demonstrations aren't as clean as this," he says. [/hide]

 

Page 2

[hide]

"It seems like an interesting technology," says Yale University hematology-oncology specialist Madhav Dhodapkar. Despite the technology's promise, however, he notes that problems can arise when tumor cells are removed from the environment that surrounds them inside the body. "We should not lose track of the complexity of cancer," Dhodapkar says. "A tumor cell separated from its microenvironment does not have the same biology, so studying interactions by taking cells out of their microenvironment has caveats."

 

Dhodapkar still believes the technology holds great promise for immunologists, cell biologists, and other researchers. "I think the biggest advantage of this technology may very well be that it will allow an opportunity to ask really detailed questions of cell-to-cell interactions that otherwise are much harder to do," he says. "If it pans out, it could be a very useful tool. Not just for cancer but for many other platforms."

 

That's precisely what Bocchi is hoping. "When we completed the project, we observed that the tool wasn't just for immunology but a more general platform that could run a large number of applications," he says. Among other uses, he points to gene therapy and even the study of microalgae--one of the great biofuel hopes.

 

In 2006, just as COCHISE was getting off the ground, Bocchi started a company called MindSeeds to develop and commercialize the technology. Before it can go much further, the company still needs to find ways to scale up the technology--its automated platform currently examines only one cell at a time--and to standardize the technology so that every experiment can be repeated to yield the same results. "Because we're not bound to a specific type of cell, we can potentially address several markets, and several fields," Bocchi says. [/hide]

 

If all goes according to plan, as per what is said in the article, cancer could be gone this century; or at least most forms of it anyway.

[Alg]

Wow.

Really all I can say.