Type 1 Diabetes in Children

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease characterized by destruction of insulin producing cells in the pancreas. Current efforts to treat these patients with human islet transplantation in an effort to restore insulin secretory function (obtained from human pancreas) are limited severely by the small numbers of donated pancreas available each year combined with the toxicity of immunosuppressive drug treatments required to prevent graft rejection.Pluripotent stem cells, instructed to differentiate into a particular pancreatic cell called a beta cell, could overcome the shortage of therapeutically effective material to transplant. They also afford the opportunity to engineer such cells to effectively resist immune attack as well as graft rejection.

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