Treatment of diabetes with insulin cell transplantation. Free Technical Library News

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Treatment of diabetes with insulin cell transplantation

10.02.2016

Type XNUMX diabetes occurs when the immune system attacks the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. A person with diabetes is forced several times a day to measure the level of sugar in his blood and make insulin injections.

The obvious solution here is to simply transplant the patient with insulin-synthesizing cells to replace the dead ones - so that the body again has someone to monitor carbohydrate metabolism. However, here the same problem arises with immunity, which attacks already new, transplanted cells, and it can only be pacified with the help of immunosuppressive drugs. That is, you need to find some way to protect the transplanted insulin cells from the immune system, put some kind of barrier between them.

A few years ago, employees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came up with special capsules for this, made from chemically modified alginic acid, which is obtained from certain types of algae. Alginic acid and its derivatives are a viscous polysaccharide in which cells can be placed so that they will live and work normally there, and sugar and protein molecules can penetrate through the capsule wall - that is, sitting in an algin "chamber", such cells can sense the level of glucose around and synthesize the right amount of insulin in response.

True, as it turned out, such capsules, when transplanted into living tissues, caused scarring: the immune system did not try to "eat" them, but still perceived them as foreign objects that entered the body after injury (which, in general, is true), and acted simply according to a different scheme, that is, he built up a connective tissue "pillow", a scar around a bad place. As a result, insulin-synthesizing cells in algin capsules generally turned out to be isolated from everything and became useless.

So now researchers are faced with the challenge of how to trick immunity in a different way, and judging by two articles in Nature Biotechnology and Nature Medicine, Daniel G Anderson and his colleagues have solved this problem. From several hundred possible chemical modifications of alginic acid, they tried to choose one that makes alginate capsules invisible to the immune system. Tests on mice and monkeys showed that TMTD, or triazole-thiomorpholine dioxide, is the most promising here: if the TMTD molecule was attached to polymeric alginic acid, it ceased to irritate the immune system.

In the following experiments, human insulin-producing cells were encapsulated in TMTD-modified alginic acid and injected into the abdominal cavity of mice with extremely active immune systems. And so, despite the very active immunity of the new host, the transplanted cells normally lived in mice for the entire time the experiment lasted, that is, 174 days, synthesizing insulin and successfully regulating blood sugar levels in animals.

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