Hope Of Pig Cell Cure For Diabetes Wins $5m Grant
The Age
Monday June 5, 1995
Pig cells will soon be transplanted to humans in bold Melbourne research that could wipe out insulin-dependent diabetes.
Specially bred pigs have provided islets cells in the pancreas that transform into insulin-producing beta cells which have been transplanted to mice and monkeys.
Tens of thousands of insulin-dependent diabetics in Australia and millions more overseas stand to benefit if Professor Leonard Harrison and colleagues at Melbourne's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and centres in Canberra and Sydney, succeed in transplanting the cells to humans with diabetes, whose immune systems destroy their own cells.
The islets, transplanted by injection, grow and regenerate, producing the insulin diabetics need to stay alive.
The United States-based International Juvenile Diabetes Foundation has awarded the research team $5 million $1 million more than total federal funding for all diabetes research across Australia this year.
The grant, announced yesterday, is the foundation's first to Australian researchers and only the second outside the US.
The research involves more than transplants: the team has discovered ways to switch off the immune system to prevent diabetes in mice, which may allow them to stop human immune systems rejecting the new tissue. They also plan to insert new genes into the cells to help build resistance to immune attack.
Professor Harrison yesterday said he believed that insulin- dependent diabetes would be a thing of the past for the next generation.
© 1995 The Age