Scientists Use Sperm Cells to Produce Insulin

There has been a lot of exciting and somewhat unusual news coming onto the medical front nowadays. For instance, they have discovered that your lungs have taste glands. They can only detect bitter tastes.

This could lead to new therapies for COPD and asthma. An artificial kidney has been constructed that works! It has hema filters as well as the patient's own kidney cells to handle the metabolic functions that the kidney has. Right now it's the size of a room, but miniaturization isn't very far behind.

The latest news is pretty remarkable. Scientists have reprogrammed sperm cells to produce insulin. This could be a big boon towards curing Type 1 diabetes. The researcher also think that they can reprogram female egg cells to also produce insulin. According to Medical News Today:

"Using sperm stem cells to make pancreatic beta insulin-producing cells could one day form the basis of a safe treatment for type 1 diabetes in men with the disease, and there is no reason why a similar treatment based on egg stem cells should not be feasible for women with the disease, scientists told a conference in the US on Sunday."

The work was done at Georgetown University Medical Center. The sperm cells secrete enough insulin to cure Type 1 diabetes but like with other stem cell research, the cells also have the ability to become cancerous.

The researchers stressed that while this research focused on male sperm cells, they see no reason that female eggs cells couldn't be used as well. Diabetes is a very serious health problem affecting about 8 percent of the population of the United States. That works out to over 23 million people.

Over the past forty years the treatment for Type 1 diabetes hasn't changed much. It requires frequent monitoring of the glucose levels of the blood and the administration of insulin by injection to control those levels.

While insulin producing cells from cadavers have been used to cure Type 1 diabetes, they don't usually last more than a year. And finding enough beta cells from cadavers is no easy task.

The researchers don't actually use mature sperm cells, but rather the only cells in men that are precursors to sperm cells, cells called induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPS cells.

First the artificial kidney and now a possible cure for diabetes. Since diabetes is the leading cause of kidney disease in this country, a double cure would sure help a lot of people.

Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/211246.php