Breakthrough allows Type I diabetics to live without insulin injections

angryoldman

Minister (2k+ posts)


In a Quebec first, a team of physicians at the McGill University Health Centre has infused a woman with Type I diabetes with insulin-producing cells, avoiding the need for a potentially risky organ-transplant operation and the lengthy hospital stay associated with it.

The hour-long procedure was carried out on May 23 at the MUHC superhospital and was the culmination of a decade of research. The MUHC hopes it will become a centre of excellence for the procedure — known as an islet transplant — for eastern Quebec and the northeast United States.

There is only one other centre in Canada, in Edmonton, that has developed the ultra-specialized expertise to perform islet transplants. The MUHC has already attracted researchers from Boston to learn more about its program.
“We certainly hope that this will not only be an MUHC network resource but a Quebec resource, and that transplant centres in Eastern Canada and Ontario will use us,” said Dr. Steven Paraskevas, director of the program.

The procedure involves injecting a needle in the patient’s liver and slowly infusing it with a solution containing several hundred thousand islets, the cells that make insulin. Those islets come from a pancreas donated upon someone’s death, but instead of grafting the organ into the body of the patient, only the cells are transplanted.

“For some patients, pancreas transplantation may be an option, but there are significant risks, and the surgery often involves specialized care in the ICU and a hospital stay that could be as long as a month,” Paraskevas explained.
By comparison, the patient is awake during the islet transplant and stays in the hospital for monitoring for just a few days, saving Quebec’s health-care system tens of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. The patient is also is spared a long, unsightly scar and possible surgical complications.

Zohra Nabbus, a 50-year-old Pointe-Claire woman, was the first patient to undergo the islet transplant at the MUHC. Five years ago, doctors transplanted her with a kidney and a pancreas, but the latter was rejected by her body’s immune system.

Nabbus had no choice but to inject herself with insulin four times a day, and she soon became prone to hypoglycemia attacks, losing consciousness after her blood sugar dropped. Nabbus had to give up driving for fear of blacking out behind the wheel and was consumed with guilt that her children had to take care of her.
“I was always tired,” she recalled. “I was not active at all. I was sleeping a lot.”

Within days of the islet transplant, Nabbus’s energy levels rebounded and the hypoglycemia attacks disappeared.
“I am so happy,” she said. “I can now take care of my family instead of them taking care of me.”

Before doctors can schedule a patient for the procedure, the islets must be extracted from the donated pancreas. The process is carried out in a lab that is three times more sterile than an operating room. For 12 hours, two highly skilled lab technicians, Craig Hasilo and Marco Gasparrini, skim the islets from the pancreas using a special solution of enzymes. Once that’s done, they test the islets for another two days to make sure they are sufficient in quantity and quality to be safely infused in the patient.

The actual infusion is performed by a radiologist, Dr. Benoit Gallix, whom the MUHC recruited from France, in part, because of his experience with islet transplants.


Source
 
Last edited by a moderator: