I was surfing the net other day for some other material and stumbled across an article at www.stuff.co.nz giving an update on the status of the first patient taking place in the pig cell transplant at Middlemore Hospital that took place recently.

They have only given the treatment to one person thus far but it is interesting to hear that the initial results are sounding positive. It is early days but the patient, a 48 year old who has had type one diabetes for 20 years hasn’t reported any negative effects of the treatment in October and has seen a 30% reduction in overall insulin dose which is pretty cool. They’ve got another 7 people that have been signed up…

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Thank you very much to Jane, who sent me a link to the newly launched website Help Cure Childhood Diabetes (for those of us T1s who are longer in the tooth, fear not, they are talking T1 – but I gather they get more bang for their heartstring-pulling buck by talking about the kids). Jane’s daughter is one of the kids they’ve used as a case study – awesome work Rachel! Her page is here: http://www.helpcurechildhooddiabetes.org/Rachel.html.

I was previously unaware of the work of Dr Denise Faustman, who is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the Director of the Immunobiology Laboratories of Massachusetts General Hospital. Her take…

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Hi everyone,
A quick post about some interesting research which I caught in my perusals on the internet today. Of course, we have all heard about ‘cures’ before but I’ve not heard of this line of research using spleen cells before. Anyway, I thought it was interesting and though it might be of interest to you.
I’ve put an excerpt below – the full story can be found on the BBC website.

“A cure for diabetes could be a step closer after scientists found cells from the spleen can transform into insulin-producing cells.US researchers were able to halt, and even reverse, the disease in mice.

The research offers hope…

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