No more daily insulin injection for diabetics with infusion of T-regs into bloodstream

No matter how fine the needle is or how long they have been enduring insulin shots, many diabetics dream of a day when there would less painful ways to get insulin inside their bodies. The dream of their tummies or legs no longer looking like pincushions due to the number of needle pricks may soon become a reality.

The game-changer for insulin-dependent diabetics would come from T-regs removed from a patient’s bod, increased 1,500 times in the laboratory and infused back into the body, resulting in restoration of normal function. The therapy, developed by scientists at the University of California, is safe and could last up to 12 months.

“By using T-regs to ‘re-educate’ the immune system, we may be able to really change the course of this disease,” The Telegraph quotes Dr Jeffrey Bluestone, professor of metabolism and endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Their team initially tried on 14 diabetics the therapy which prevents the progression of the chronic ailment with no known cure yet. By averting its progression, diabetics are spared from possible complications such as blindness and amputation later.

They removed about two cups of blood, which contains 2 million to 4 million T-reg cells, from the 14 newly diagnosed patients aged between 18 and 43. The T-reg cells were separated from other cells, replicated in a growth medium and then infused back into the blood.

The study, published in the Science Translational Medicine journal, found that “the ex vivo-expanded polyclonal T_regs were long-lived after transfer and retained broad T_reg phenotype long-term.”

One of the 14 is 39-year-old child psychologist Mary Rooney who credits the therapy with freeing her from daily insulin shots. Before she was diagnosed, Rooney suffered from weight loss, frequent thirsty and temporary blurry vision.

Since she works as a researcher at the university, she learned that UCSF was looking for volunteers for the T-reg trial which involved using her regulatory T-cells. Besides diabetes, the therapy could possibly work on other autoimmune ailments such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus as well as other chronic diseases such as cardiovascular problems, obesity and neurological diseases.

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