Grant: Operating Grant

Type 1 diabetes is a devastating disease that causes reduced quality and length of life in humans. Treatments that aim to correct the loss of insulin-secreting pancreatic beta cells in type 1 diabetes traditionally involve multiple daily injections of insulin and recently transplantation of cells from donors. However, both regimens have their drawbacks as they are invasive and supply of donor tissue is limited. Therefore the generation of beta cells from human stem cells from either embryonic or adult tissue, represents a potentially unlimited supply of beta cells to treat this debilitating disease. Our collaborators have successfully generated beta-like cells from human embryonic and adult human pancreatic tissue but these cells have yet to be fully characterised for their insulin secreting potential. Therefore, this grant aims to determine the expression profile of hormones, including insulin, in these two stem cell populations and see whether they secrete insulin normally when stimulated with glucose. Beta cells contain very specialised glucose sensing machinery within them and we propose to establish which parts of this machinery are defective in the stem cell-derived beta cells. Finally we will examine the pattern of genes and proteins that are expressed in pure populations of stem cell-derived beta cells. The information gained from these studies will help to generate strategies to improve the production of beta cells from different sources of stem cells to be used in the treatment of type 1 diabetes.