According to statistics, there are about 400 million people with diabetes in the world, although only about 5% of them are type 1 diabetes, the percentage is not large, but because of the big base, the absolute number of patients with type 1 diabetes is still a huge crowd. In the treatment of diabetes, clinical drugs such as sulfonylurea drugs, thiazolidinedione drugs, SGLT-2 inhibitors, DPP-4 inhibitors [Vildagliptin (intermediate 3-amino-1-adamantanol), and biguanide drugs, the indication of these drugs is type 2 diabetes. Because of absolute lack of insulin secretion, patients with type 1 diabetes need lifelong insulin replacement therapy, including animal insulin, human insulin, and human insulin analogs. The therapeutic regimen is repeated insulin injections and continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion, which has brought great inconvenience to the daily life of the patients.

Scientists have been extensively studied and found that islet transplantation may be an effective way to treat or cure diabetes, especially for type 1 diabetes. Currently, islet grafts are often transported through the portal vein to the patient's liver, because the portal vein can obtain adequate nutrients and insulin support, so it is very suitable for islet transplantation. However, this often gives patients a certain health risk, such as potential complications from the bleeding, hemagglutination and portal hypertension, etc.

In this study, the researchers studied other implant sites, hoping to overcome the risk of portal vein transplantation. The study found that, whether human islet cells or mouse islet cells, transplanting them to the muscle site is much better, which not only can play a better role, but also has more advantages to facilitate the patient with more biopsy. Another problem is that the human organ donor is extremely scarce and the number of donors for human islet transplantation is extremely limited. And xenotransplantation, the transplant of pig cells into the human body, may be able to use as a potential mean to treat patients with type 1 diabetes.

If the study could do the human clinical trials successfully, it may develop a new treatment for effective treatment of type 1 diabetes, and even bring hope for the cure of diabetic patients.

References

[1] Rebecca A. Stokes, Kim Cheng, Amit Lalwani, et al. Transplantation sites for human and murine islets. Diabetologia, 2017, 60, 1961-1971.