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Transcript
Narrator:
The Diabetes Research Institute presents a series of reports on the latest progress in cure-focused research – promising discoveries aimed at restoring natural insulin production in those living with diabetes.
Reporter:
Inside a healthy pancreas are clusters of cells that produce insulin. These cells --called “islets” – are scattered throughout the organ.
They survive with the help of a protein called an “extra cellular matrix.” It helps provide the islets the nutrients, nerves and structural support they need.
But, when scientists remove islet cells from a pancreas, to transplant into another patient, they separate the cells from that support system.
And many islets die. Since these cells are in great demand and short supply, researchers are focusing on ways to protect and strengthen them – so more will survive. That’s the research focus of the DRI’s Dr. Elizabeth Fenjves.
Fenjves:
“We need to take, to isolate those islets from the pancreas, which is great because that’s how we get the cells that produce the insulin. The negative part of that is that we’re ripping them out literally from their neighborhood, from where they’re happy and they’re getting all of the messages from the neighboring cells to do what they’re supposed to do, and this extraction, if you would, from the pancreas is very, very damaging to these islets. So on the one hand we’re isolating them and then we have the capacity to transplant them. On the other hand, the isolation itself is very damaging to the cells.”
Reporter:
What the islets are missing in isolation are “extra cellular matrix proteins.”
Fenjves:
“So we’re asking is it possible to add those back and thus help the cells survive.”
Reporter:
Researchers at the DRI are studying what extra cellular matrix proteins exist naturally in the pancreas …and are trying to recreate that environment in the lab … to help islets remain healthy.
Fenjves:
“When we add some of those proteins in culture, then we ask, ‘Are the islets now secreting more insulin? Are they more glucose responsive? What are their metabolic activities like? Are they dying as easily?’ We ask all of those questions, and then we try to combine synergistically the extracellular matrix proteins that give us the best answers to those questions.”
Reporter:
Dr. Fenjves and her team have identified three important proteins.
Fenjves:
“We’re working with a company that is now coding plates with those proteins and so our hope is that now those plates will recreate the environment that these islets had in vivo, in the pancreas, and will now help the isolation period to go more easily for the islets.”
Reporter:
She says she is excited about where this research is heading.
Fenjves:
“I think if we are able to recreate what happens in a natural pancreas in a dish, we could really get these islets to survive and we’re already seeing that. We’re not only getting them to survive, we’re getting them to make more insulin. We’re getting them to be metabolically more active. We’re getting them to be less fragile, and I think that could really add a whole new venue of research that would be very clinically relevant, because it would really protect these cells prior to the transplant setting and that would be very, very exciting.”
Reporter:
She says the Diabetes Research Institute offers the unique chance to take such research from the lab to the clinical setting – the patient – all under one roof.
Fenjves:
“That’s one of the great things about being here, at the DRI, because we are one of the few institutes that really can do that -- that can take an idea and take it from its inception through the pre-clinical models, through small animals, in vitro and take them all the way to in vivo, in humans.”
Narrator:
This has been a production of the Diabetes Research Institute Foundation.
For more information, or to show your support for the Diabetes Research Institute, call 1-800-321-3437.
You also may donate online at diabetesresearch.org.
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