Cell Transplants

Current treatments for Type I diabetes are palliative and require constant glucose monitoring and repeated daily insulin injections. In contrast, the transplantation of insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells could free patients of monitoring and injections altogether.

In recent years, a team led by University of Alberta Professor and MicroIslet former Scientific Advisory Board member, Dr. James Shapiro, managed to cure diabetes in dozens of patients by transplanting them with human pancreatic islet cells. (Shapiro et al, New England Journal of Medicine, 343(4): 230-8, 2000) As of June 2002, the "Edmonton Protocol" has been performed on more than 130 patients. Furthermore, 85% of the original patients remained insulin-free for one year or more following the transplant — more than ten times the success rate seen for islet transplants in the 1990s.

The Edmonton protocol has been widely recognized as the most important advance in diabetes treatment in recent years. Dr. Shapiro has received many awards for his experimental studies on islet research and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation has committed $24 million to refine the protocol.

The effectiveness of islet transplantation has been demonstrated in principle by the Edmonton studies, however it faces two major obstacles which prevent it from helping all Type I diabetics, namely 1) the need for continuous immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection of the transplanted human islet cells and 2) the lack of human donor tissue.

MicroIslet is dedicated to overcoming these obstacles by commercializing porcine islets, which are in abundant supply, and encapsulating them to avoid an immune rejection and the need for toxic immunosuppression therapy.

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