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Biotech Science

Diabetes "Cured" In Mice With Virus Therapy 52

Posted by timothy from the please-trick-my-brain-into-acting-like-a-brain dept.
phlack writes "Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine have found a way to treat diabetes in mice by using a virus (with the harmful genes removed) to trick the liver into working as a pancreas. This is still a ways away from working in humans, but it's progress, at least. Info can be found at Guardian and Science Daily."
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Diabetes "Cured" In Mice With Virus Therapy More

Diabetes "Cured" In Mice With Virus Therapy

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  • Now (Score:4, Funny)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @01:00PM (#5774585) Journal
    All the need to do is invent another virus that makes some other organ function as a liver!

    • Re:Now (Score:4, Funny)

      by unperson ( 223869 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @01:32PM (#5774799)
      All the need to do is invent another virus that makes some other organ function as a liver!

      I second that! But I see a vicious cycle occuring...

      1. Drink alcohol. Liver goes out. Virus ingested to cause pancreas to function as liver.

      2. Pancreas begins functioning as liver. Now we have

      Pancreas = Pancreas + Liver

      The extra workload causes pancreas to fail.

      3. Virus #2 must be invented.

      Appendix = Appendix + Pancreas + Liver.

      ...and we all know that the appendix is a good-for-nothing, organ.

      .

      .

      .

      n. Head stuck in climate controlled jar ala Futurama (esp. season 1)...

      The future is now!

      • Re:Now (Score:3, Insightful)

        by orangesquid ( 79734 )
        cat /dev/consciousness >/dev/slashdot:
        Actually, who knows---maybe the Appendix is really there as a scratch organ for virus therapy techniques! Kind of like a /tmp ?

    • Re:Now (Score:5, Funny)

      by L. VeGas ( 580015 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @01:33PM (#5774808) Homepage Journal
      Nah, I need something to keep my dick from acting as my brain.

      • Re:Now (Score:4, Funny)

        by belroth ( 103586 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @03:57PM (#5775860)
        Nah, I need something to keep my dick from acting as my brain.
        Get married!
      • I think they have surgeries that help solve part of this problem, but they come at the expense of losing your ability to park properly or find directions while driving, not to mention the all-important ability to pee whilst standing up.
    • that sure would help my coordination during marathon games of beer die. Olyimpic beer die is just so hard when you are drunk. two livers = more drinking before intoxication = more beer die championships!

  • As a diabetic (Score:4, Insightful)

    by devphil ( 51341 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @01:07PM (#5774637) Homepage


    I have to wonder what takes the place of the liver. (Articles have been /.ed into dust.)

    Given the choice between a normal liver plus insulin injections, versus a "virtual pancreas" and some unknown liver treatment, I think I'd stick with the devil I knew.

    More precisely, I know how my body reacts to insulin injections. Nobody knows how it would react to - ah screw it, I can't seem to express this thought coherently.

    • Re:As a diabetic (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ah screw it, I can't seem to express this thought coherently.

      Yeah, but let's click submit anyway. Moron.


      • At least two other people understood me. The thought worked in the first paragraphs. Brain only gave out in that last one.

        (Why am I even bothering to talk to an AC? Fuck, I must be bored.)

    • Re:As a diabetic (Score:1, Informative)

      by GigsVT ( 208848 )
      Actually, they apparently used liver cells that were treated with the virus in vitro. This doesn't look anything like a viable technology, and they admit it's at least 10 year off to find a suitable carrier virus. And even then, they said something like the person would have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their life.


      • So, I can exchange taking insulin for the rest of my life with taking anti-rejection drugs for the rest of my life? What have I gained?

        Clearly I'm missing a point somewhere.

        • No. Gig's just needs to RTFA.

          • Re:Er, hang on a minute (Score:2, Informative)

            by GigsVT ( 208848 )
            I read the article, I just misunderstood it. It was a poorly written article.

            The hope is that gene therapy might offer an alternative to another promising but still rare treatment which is undergoing trials in Britain. This involves transplanting cells from other people's pancreases into patients. But patients, even if freed from insulin injections, would have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives and there is a shortage of potential donors.

      • No, GigsVT, you are VERY confused. The technique we are discussing, of using a viral vector to turn a fraction of liver cells into pancreatic cells, does NOT need immuno-suppressing drugs. That was a totally different method also mentioned in the Guardian article. And this technique was NOT done in vitro, it was done in vivo in mice. Please get some reading comprehension lessons before posting again, ok?

    • Re:As a diabetic (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > I have to wonder what takes the place of the liver. (Articles have been /.ed into dust.)

      This prototype treatment only affects a small portion of the liver; it caused the growth of cell islets that produced insulin and three pancreatic hormones. Liver function was apparently unaffected by the growth of the islets. The goal is a one-time shot to induce the islets' growth. After that, they're self-maintaining just like the other liver tissues.

      It did temporarily (for four months) cure the diabetes, so it

  • Safe Vectors (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @01:16PM (#5774702)
    FYI - The real question about this, and other gene therapy experiments, focueses on the safety of the vector being used. In this case an adenovirus virus was used. The virus itself is no longer virulent, but how does the target genetic material get integrated into the hosts genome? If it occurs at a specific site, then safety is maximized. If it occurs randomly, then you run the risk of knocking out genes where only a single healthy allele exists (loss of heterozygosity) and potentially, cancer.

    Gene therapy holds a lot of promise, but the early cases of leukemia (remember the bubble boy cure? Two 'cured' patients subsequently developed cancer) make it prohibative. I'm an expert enough to know this a problem (in theory and in practice) but not enough of one to know how close we are to solving it.

    -Sean

  • Here's a link (Score:3, Informative)

    by VisorGuy ( 548245 ) <ina c t i ve> on Monday April 21, 2003 @01:23PM (#5774740) Journal
    to Google News [google.com]' list of related articles [google.com].

  • Problem of autoimmune destruction not solved (Score:5, Insightful)

    by baz00f ( 520771 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @01:53PM (#5774942)
    I just read the Nature Medicine article [nature.com] and the authors speculate that they were able to induce differentiation of hepatic stem cells or hepatocytes into islet-like cells, and it looks very convincing. A potential major shortcoming of this approach is not addressed, which is that in type I ("juvenile") diabetes, the islet cells are destroyed by an autoimmune response. Thus if you generate new self "pseudo islets", you may have present the very antigens that led to their destruction in the first place. The reason that is not a problem in this experiment is that the authors artificially destroy the islets with the toxin streptozotocin. The real test would be in an animal model that mimics type I diabetes, like the non-obese diabetic (NOD) mouse. I hope and assume that is the next critical experiment.
    • I suspect that, once you have a way to make new insulin-producing cells, the autoimmune problem will be relatively easy to get around. Prior to this point there was no way to test any potential solutions simply because the problem has never been detected in people until it was too late and their islets were destroyed.

      Current immunosuppressive drugs may do well to inhibit the destruction of the new glands. Then again, the "pseudo-islets" may not even express the same antigens as the natural islets of Lang

      • Re:Problem of autoimmune destruction not solved (Score:5, Interesting)

        by iawia ( 9172 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @05:09PM (#5776361) Homepage
        Ah, no, not easy.

        In tests where people have received new insulin-producing cells (either separately, or as part of an entire liver/pancreas transplant) immuno-suppressive drugs are indeed used. In some cases those drug prove effective, but in others the immune-system again destroys the new cells.

        Other research has been successful in the 'mice' stage, providing new beta cells wrapped in a miniature shell, with openings wide enough for the insulin to get out, but not wide enough for T-cells to get in, thus providing protection from the immune system. No human tests, yet, though. (I'm sorry to say... as a diabetic, I'd be ready to participate in that kind of research.)

        But as you say, this new line is at least an interesting new (for me) approach, and the new islets might be different enough for the immune system to ignore them.
        • You have to remember that a transplant of islet cells suffers from a double-whammy; not only are they of a cell type that the immune system previously destroyed, but they're also foreign organisms, coming from another human being. It'd be difficult to predict how much better immunosuppressants might work on cells that weren't foreign but merely altered.
          • Well, the eventual idea would be to use islet cells grown from your own stem cells. That is, if the government ever lets us. I am diabetic as well, and waiting for treatment sucks. Guess it'll be 7 shots a day for a while now. On the other hand, research in oral insulin (www.emisphere.com) looks promising.


            Thom

            • Even if you can get your own stem cells to differentiate into new islets, the immune system defect that led to their destruction in the first place still exists, so it is likely they will be destroyed again. The solution would be to knock out the self-antigen responsible (assuming it's not essential for islet function) or to fix the immune system and trick it into being tolerant of the problem antigen(s) (we are not there yet). Or take immunosuppressant drugs, which is not worth the cure in my opinion.
            • No needles would be nice, but my insulin needs are so convoluted that I really need the flexibility of an insulin pump to get my blood glucose values to be acceptable. (Besides, after 16 years, I really don't care about one puncture more or less:-)

              The oral insulin looks interesting, but any system that still requires me to actively maintain the balance between glucose and insulin is only of temporary value.

              One option that won't necessarily require gene/clone research is encapsulation of beta cells before
          • That is indeed a problem, but it apparently is possible to chart the two effects seperately. The type of T cells used to attack foreign material is different enough from the auto-immune type for there to be seperate tests for the two effects.

            I attended a presentation on a Dutch/Belgian effort late last year, where the subjects were people who had a whole pancreas transplanted. There were neatly seperated charts for the normal immune reaction and the auto-immune reaction, and the combination. Only is both r
            • It's not that I like talking to myself, but I just came across the following interview [insulinfree.org]
              with a guy that is actually working on selectively stopping only the auto-immune reaction.

              Yet another case of progress being made at high speed... (Too high for me to keep tabs on, anyways)
              Go!
      • ... once you come up with a way of stealing underpants, the problem of generating profit will be relatively easy to get around.

  • Swapping problems (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @02:02PM (#5775021) Homepage

    Now the mice will have to deal with a brand new problem.. dysfunctional livers, which will then be augumented with normal livers from other 'failed' mice. I'm sure most diabetics patients will prefer the frequent needle.
    • No, only part of the liver is being changed, there is no problems in the mice with their original livers.
  • Up to 2/3 of your liver may be destroyed (or poisoned) and it will still function correctly. I very much doubt that anything like this much will be affected by this process. Therefore it is safe to assume that there will be no percieved effects of this treatment other than the positive!

  • Type II? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @04:55PM (#5776241) Homepage
    This sort of advance should work very well for people who have type I diabetes, where their bodies no long secrete insulin. I have to wonder how well it will work in people with adult-onset, type II diabetes, which is triggered by a malformed receptor that isn't sensitive enough to secreted insulin. The use of oral or injectable insulin might be eliminate, but I worry that the attendant physical ailments, such as diabetic retinopathy, will still dog those who suffer. Unfortunately, the problem of fixing those receptors may prove to be much more difficult.

  • Type 1 Diabetes cured LONG ago!!! (Score:4, Informative)

    by ivi ( 126837 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @03:54AM (#5779533)

    C'mon, fellas... CBC's science program Quirks & Quarks
    reported (over 18 months ago) that islet transplants
    were suceeding in almost 90% of cases.

    A further development (by a private sector co.)
    reported greater success rates or fewer problems.

    Let's get this story as well, eh?
  • I'm glad someone's helping the mice out there. We [ualberta.ca] on the other hand will keep curing humans [ualberta.ca].
  • Even if they can get better vector (non-viral)which does not cause the modified cells to be eliminated, they will still have hard time to produce the right level of insulin in this way. The right insulin level is very individual thing (type II diabetics have a lot their own insulin - except that their cells ignore it).

    Insulin excretion by pancreas is tightly regulated - you get a peak production about 30min-1 hour after the meal, which causes you to feel non-hungry.

    High insulin levels are toxic. Intraveno
    • The idea, as far as I can read it from the linked articles, is that the new insulin producing cells act in the same way as normal, pancreas based, beta cells would. If this is the case, then they would presumably also react to the blood glucose level, and 'automatically' release insulin as long as that level is too high/rising.
      • Yeah, but too many (or too little) beta cells and you have a problem.

        Few years ago, there was an article about patient with tumor from beta cells: She found out that she had to eat a lot of sugar to feel OK. As the tumor grew, her sweet taste grew too - eventualy she was consuming over half a pound of sugar daily. She became grossly overweight at that point.

  • A few more links and ideas (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SolemnDragon ( 593956 ) <solemndragonNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @08:26AM (#5780380) Homepage Journal
    Here [stanford.edu] is one article addressing autoimmune diseases and mice. It's relevant because it's utilising gene technologies and mentions diabetes. Diabetes- according to what i know of it, and i'll admit that my knowledge comes by way of celiac sprue and sjogren's, which sit on the same gene bench- is one of the diseases that they're actively looking for a shutoff for. There are cases where some trigger just runs up the line and hits all the genetic trigger 'switches', resulting in a number of things, including adult onset diabetes. Yes, it takes a lot of environmental factors to make this happen, but it happens more than you think, so pay attention.

    Here [nih.gov] is an excellent read on type one diabetes and stem cell research, and a comment [ezboard.com]on why study sjogren's in conjunction with diabetes (namely, the organ being damaged is much easier to get at and assess.)

    Here [cdc.gov] is a great site for info- the CDC genomics site, which includes info on common and rare genetic diseases, and can give a greater array of background info. NCBI [nih.gov] offers another set of info- an explanation of human mouse homology (thus answering the question... why mice?

    I hope this helps put some extra info out there for those of you who are interested. And frankly, as one who has had to deal with the sudden "switching on" of not just one but a whole array of diseases- since my DNA happened to include the lucky strands- I'm now having my stance on animal testing completely revised...

  • I saw on the discovery health channel once where a man had to have his pancreas removed and they havested his beta cells and injected them into his liver so his body could produce insulin.

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