Background
Adapted pancreas
Wednesday 19 June 2013

The immune system of people with type 1 diabetes attacks its own body - to be precise: the beta cells in the Islets of Langerhans, which are part of the pancreas. Beta cells produce the hormone insulin, which regulates our blood sugar levels.

Patients can be treated by being given Islets of Langerhans from a donor, but then they are attacked even more severely by their immune system, because those Islets of Langerhans are alien to them. Consequently, this treatment is reserved for patients who already have a donor organ because diabetes has destroyed their kidneys, for instance. LUMC researcher Arnaud Zaldumbide is the first author of a paper in Molecular Therapy that presents a possible solution to the immunity problem. The donor cells can be genetically adapted so that they are less noticeable to the immune cells that attack them. The good news is that it works. The bad news is, so far, it has only worked in mice.