Islet Stand-ins

In type 1 diabetes, the cells of the pancreas that sense blood sugar and secrete insulin accordingly (islet cells) are destroyed. To both fix the problem and avoid immune rejection, doctors are hoping to replace the damaged cells with new ones grown from the patient’s own stem cells. To that end, researchers have grown these insulin-secreting organoids– clumps of cells that mimic the islets. The insulin-producing cells are labelled in red, and other associated hormone-producing cells are green. The organoids were grown from human stomach stem cells rather than pancreatic ones – simply because the cells are similar in nature but more readily retrieved (via endoscopy). Encouragingly, transplants of the organoids into mice with diabetes improved the animals’ symptoms and reversed signs of disease. With no available cure for diabetes, these proof-of-principle transplantations offer encouraging results that suggest such an approach might indeed be successful in the clinic.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Xiaofeng Huang and colleagues
• Division of Regenerative Medicine and Hartman Institute for Therapeutic Organ Regeneration, Department of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature Cell Biology, April 2023