Grant: Emerging Team Grant: Regenerative Medicine and Nanomedicine

Diabetes is a chronic, debilitating disease characterized by high blood sugar levels that result from insufficient insulin production. Insulin is a hormone that is normally produced by specialized cells that reside in the pancreas, called beta-cells. In type 1 diabetes, these beta-cells are killed by the immune system, whereas in type 2 diabetes, beta-cells are not able to produce enough insulin to prevent blood sugar from rising. The majority of patients with type 1 diabetes, and approximately one third of those with type 2 diabetes require daily insulin injections to survive. Unfortunately this crude and inconvenient therapy seldom achieves optimal control of blood sugar levels and occasional high sugar levels result in long-term organ damage and reduced lifespan. Transplant of a few milliliters of donor beta-cells represents a promising approach to cure diabetes, but is currently hampered by an insufficient supply of donor cells. We have assembled a new Team of investigators with a diverse skill set that aim to directly tackle this major impediment to a broadly available cure for diabetes. We have developed a protocol for the step-wise differentiation of human stem cells into cells that resemble the direct neighbour of beta-cells, the alpha-cells. We believe that, with subtle refinements to this protocol, we will be successful in producing a differentiation protocol that will preferentially produce beta-cells that are capable of reversing diabetes. To achieve this, we propose using both informed strategies and unbiased high throughput screening approaches. Ultimately, we hope our efforts will result in the discovery of a method to produce larger numbers of beta-cells that will free patients from the burdens of insulin injections.