Chinese scientists achieve diabetes cure through innovative cell therapy, detailed in Cell Discovery. Patient, treated in July 2021, no longer requires insulin after eleven weeks, and is now medication-free for 33 months. The breakthrough, praised by Timothy Kieffer, signifies a major advancement in diabetes treatment. This novel approach utilizes the body's regenerative abilities and could alleviate China's healthcare burden. Further studies are needed for validation.
As a lay-person, it seems kind of light on details and a bit fanciful. The article states they created pancreatic islet seed cells, but fails to link how exactly this cures diabetes. (I’m assuming these cells create the insulin.)
Another point is this seems to fly in t he face of what we’ve been told for decades, that diabetes can now be cured and not just managed. (I personally don’t have a problem with this, everything is impossible until it becomes possible.)
The biggest issue I see is that this cured one person. Diabetes is a fairly common condition, they shouldn’t have had a problem getting more participants in a study.
I believe that it states somewhere that it was a case study or a proof of concept. Which is a common approach to interventions (medical or otherwise) that are difficult, expensive, and time consuming. If you can find a way to get it to work then maybe it’s worth expanding and finding more efficient/effective ways of implementing the intervention.
Islet cells are the insulin secreting cells in the pancreas. This literally sounds like the general idea is that if you don’t have sufficient insulin production to cover the load your body is under, solving it by engineering new islet cells from your own tissues (so as to avoid rejection) and then implanting them.
Basically, if your pancreas isn’t strong enough to do the job, then just add more pancreas until it is.