Grant: Emerging Team Grant: Regenerative Medicine and Nanomedicine - LOI

Diabetes is a chronic disease with devastating complications and no cure. There are more than 250 million people that suffer from diabetes and due in part to the duration of the disease the financial burden on society is roughly equivalent to that of all cancers combined. Canada has the 3rd highest prevalence of type 1 diabetes in the world and the incidence of this disease is increasing 3% per year. Clearly, diabetes remains a critical health problem in Canada and abroad. Responding to the challenge, Canada has been a leader in diabetes research since the discovery of insulin nearly 90 years ago. Diabetes is characterized by sustained elevation in blood sugar resulting from the absolute or relative lack of insulin-producing pancreatic beta-cells. An elegant solution would be to simply replace the patient's beta-cells, thereby eliminating the need for insulin injections. Clinical islet transplantation is a rapid procedure in which a few millilitres of purified insulin-secreting islets are injected into the liver under local anaesthesia. Due in large part to the advances of the Edmonton Protocol, this therapy reduces and in some cases eliminates the need for insulin injections. Currently the procedure relies on islet tissue from organ donors and is thus not widely available as a treatment. Our goal is to develop procedures to coax embryonic stem cells into insulin producing beta-cells in a scalable fashion such that this transplant procedure will be available to all those suffering with diabetes.