Doctors in China have successfully treated a woman with type 1 diabetes using lab-grown insulin-producing cells made from her own tissue. Scientists reprogrammed her cells into stem cells, then grew them into small clusters capable of releasing insulin. One year after receiving the transplant, her blood sugar levels remain normal without any medication. This marks the first time in history that a person with type 1 diabetes has been cured of insulin dependence using cells derived entirely from their own body, not from a donor or embryo, paving the way for personalized treatments for millions.
Sounds like it’s going to be pretty costly, will be interesting to see if this becomes available to everyone or the select few
Because we don’t have widespread deployment of treatments like this, we still understand next to nothing about the underlying autoimmune disorder that causes the body to attack its own pancreas in the first place - type 1 diabetes is effectively a symptom of something else rather than its own disease. Stem cell derived transplants are normally completely free from rejection risk due to being cells from the patient’s own body, but if your immune system destroyed something once, transplanting in something identical to replace it wouldn’t be expected to go any better. That means you still need immunosuppressants like you would if you had a transplant from someone else, and those are generally considered riskier than having type 1 diabetes is in the first place. The patient in the study had already had two liver transplants and a failed pancreas transplant, so was already taking the necessary drugs. Offering this treatment to someone who hadn’t already had a transplant would probably be pretty unlikely unless their blood sugar control with insulin injections and sensible eating was genuinely awful.
There are other experimental treatments that involve other ways of protecting the insulin-generating cells from the immune system, like membranes that allow insulin and sugar through, but not white blood cells. That’s apparently a harder thing to do as that’s been in progress since before stem cells were viable. However, once it is working, you can just use off-the-shelf genetically modified bacteria rather than bespoke stem cells, and avoid the need for immunosuppressants, so it should work out as the better treatment eventually.
I dont see why. Culturing cells back into stem cells is very cheap. Maybe expensive to do in bulk, but you dont need to do it in bulk. You only need maybe a dozen stem cells. The hard part would be modifying the cells to produce insulin. But once you have a retrovirus to do that, that becomes almost free considering its absurdly easy to replicate viruses. After that, youd just have to culture the cells to get more, again, very easy.
I havent read the article yet, but depending on how they reintroduce those cells back into the body is almost certainly the most expensive part excluding down investment on originally creating the virus, which only has to be done once.
Edit: see my comment below
Having read the article entirely, the answer is kinda. This particular patient had a lot of complications as a result of their diabetes, so they had to use a bunch of extra medications to prevent complications. No clue how expensive those were, but thats not a cost inherant to the process. If you were “fixed” as soon as your diabetes becomes apparant, that wouldnt be neccassary.
They also did a bunch of animal testing after having gone through the process of creating the cells. Strictly speaking, not meccassary for the future. It was neccassary here as it is a novel approach, and it will continue being neccassary until this is a regularly permormed operation. Once the process is widely regarded to be safe, and weve dialed in the exact process to controlling the production, that sortve testing should become obselete.
Finally, the transplant is absurdly cheap. Basically free.
All together, the reasearch is absurdly more expensive than the process. For most of the world, this should be a very effective, cheap, relatively fast, and noninvasive. This is huge news! Of course in the US you cant afford it.
Insulin used to be costly and complicated to manufacture, now it costs $25-35 for vials of standard basic varieties in non-insane countries with proper regulation of the pharmaceutical and medical industries (sorry united States, this doesn’t include you). This treatment was almost unimaginable just at the turn of the millennium, but is now reality, affordable therapy shouldn’t be impossible although it may take time to lay that groundwork.
That’s synthesizing a chemical vs. a custom treatment for each patient. Still, you’re right, the price will eventually drop.
About a dozen biotechs worldwide doing a similar protocol. Commercial facilities to generate the stem cells are now online.
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do something.
- Pharmaceutical Industry
