Article via https://news.weill.cornell.edu
In the study, which appeared April 27 in Nature Cell Biology, the researchers showed that they could take stem cells obtained from human stomach tissue and reprogram them directly—with strikingly high efficiency—into cells that closely resemble pancreatic insulin-secreting cells known as beta cells.
Insulin is a hormone that regulates blood glucose levels—without it, blood glucose becomes too high, causing diabetes and its many complications.
An estimated 1.6 million Americans have type 1 diabetes, which results from an autoimmune attack that destroys beta cells in the pancreas.
In a 2016 study, again in mice, he and his team showed that certain stem cells in the stomach, called gastric stem cells, are also highly sensitive to this three-factor activation method.
“The stomach makes its own hormone-secreting cells, and stomach cells and pancreatic cells are adjacent in the embryonic stage of development, so in that sense it isn’t completely surprising that gastric stem cells can be so readily transformed into beta-like insulin-secreting cells,” Dr. Zhou said.