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Gene-edited pancreatic cells transplanted into a patient with type 1 diabetes
- m3kw9 1y agoType 2, they need to solve type 2.
- kingkawn 1y agoNobody had thought of this wow
- bentt 1y agoWe were here, at the moment of inspiration
- mezeek 1y agoisn't that what GLP1s are for (before you get full blown type 2)
- javchz 1y agoYes, but even lifestyle changes (like a diet low in glycemic load and building muscle) can help reduce many of the harmful effects of type 2 diabetes, even sending it into remission for some people in early stages. Type 1 is a different story. It’s the lack of natural insulin production (due to a damaged pancreas, autoimmune or other causes), basically the opposite problem to type 2, and no amount of lifestyle changes will replace of need of insulin doses.
- kulahan 1y agoI just want to make clear what the other commenter said: type 2 is completely reversible in its early stages. Lose weight, eat a more healthy diet, and you should see your body return to normal. Unfortunately, there's a serious time limit on this news, as the disease does permanently damage your cells, but in a way that's not terrible. It's probably easier to be shocked by a diagnosis into a lifestyle change than to find out now and undo 30 years of living with daily insulin injections anyways.
- moi2388 1y ago[flagged]
- UI_at_80x24 1y agoI know you put the caveat "mostly" in here but it's important to state that this is not always true. I was diagnosed with T2 a couple of years ago. During that time I was cycling 25 miles a day. After the diagnoses I completely eliminated all carbs from my diet. My blood sugar was still not under control. My fasting blood sugar (first thing in the morning, and 18hrs of fasting) was the highest point of the day. (14-18 mmol/L) I fasted (water only) for 1 week. no difference. I was on a bunch of medication, none of it helped. It wasn't until I started taking a GLP-1 drug that my sugar came under control. So medication (ozempic) was critical to me getting my blood sugar under control. Diet didn't fix it. Exercise didn't help. I've lost ~90lbs since then. I'd probably have died/gone into a coma if not for GLP-based drugs. My anecdote does not contradict wide-spread science and medically derived knowledge. But it should help temper the fat and diet shaming that exists in society.
- fhdkweig 1y agoIf you lost 90 lbs, you must have been at least 90 lbs overweight. That isn't a little bit of fat. That is a lot of fat. And it takes a lifetime to put on that much fat. You can't really claim that you had proper exercise and diet before you started taking medications. I have seen many episodes of My 600 LB Life and similar shows where the clients and their caretakers swear on their mother's graves that they even eat at all, but that isn't how reality and physics work. Don't misunderstand, I'm glad they made the GLP-1 drugs, but still, they have for years been reversing Type 2 diabetes through exercise a diet.
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoCalories in/out is the only reliable way (short of surgery or drugs anyway) to reliably change the size of your body in either direction. Genetics, where you are on the planet, hormones, and your average activity levels tweak things but this remains fundamentally true: If you eat in a calorie deficit, you will lose weight. If you eat in a calorie surplus, you will gain weight. It's not hateful, it's math. If you have a hard time getting your intake down due to life circumstances, addictions, stress, whatever, you have my utmost sympathies and I would do anything I could to help, but I'm not going to bullshit you. If you want to weigh less, you must, over a long period of time, take in fewer calories than you burn in a day. That is how you lose weight in the most nuts-and-bolts way there is.
- snarf21 1y agoThere have been a lot of advancements on this front too. One promising technique is duodenum resurfacing (DMR). This helps reset some of the insulin sensitivity issues. The one problem we have is that this is a one time low risk procedure compared to selling insulin or GLP-1. Like all of our problems in healthcare, we have a major misalignment in incentives.
- PicassoCTs 1y ago[dead]
- toomuchtodo 1y agoIf GLP-1 Drugs Are Good for Everything, Should We All Be on Them? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44830685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44830685 - August 2025
- CyberDildonics 1y agoIf you treat sugar as an addiction you can solve it yourself.
- Pwntastic 1y agohttps://archive.is/tBrzc https://archive.is/tBrzc
- mlhpdx 1y agoThis seems like it’s on the right track. Finally something that doesn’t require immunosuppressants.
- beached_whale 1y agoIt was in people and not mice too. So many of these headlines are in cell cultures or mice.
- RHSeeger 1y agoBecause it has been commented over and over "oh, type 2 is because you are overweight"... > We tend to think of type 2 diabetes as a disease that afflicts people who are overweight. But it can also appear in people with perfectly healthy weights—and be more deadly in them. A study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that normal-weight people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes have double the risk of dying from heart disease and other causes than overweight people with diabetes. - https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/diabetes-can-strike-hard-even-when-weight-is-normal-201208085121 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/diabetes-can-strike-hard... (Yes, I know this post is about Type 1... but _all_ of the talk in it when I posted this was about Type 2; and basically blaming the people with it for their condition)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- spinach 1y agoBut being overweight is a huge risk factor for developing it and absolutely can contribute to it. I don't how it being more deadly in skinny people detracts from that or is relevant at all.
- chips_not_fries 1y agoit's one factor but weight and diet isn't the only component
- RHSeeger 1y agoBecause people (who don't know what they're talking about) respond with statements like "you can cure Diabetes Type 2 with diet and exercise", and - That's false. For _most_ people, you can prevent the symptoms of it with those, but not all. Nor does it _cure_ it, it prevents it from presenting symptoms. The same way that avoiding a food you are allergic to doesn't cure the allergy, it just prevents it from impacting you - It's insulting to a lot of people that _are_ eating and exercising well, but still battling with Diabetes Type 2 It's wrong and it's insulting.
- 1y ago
- psb 1y agoJust sent this to my son, seems legitimately promising
- DarwinsToffees 1y agoThis is very encouraging, but will take a long time to get to any type of usable treatment because these cells are literally made to evade the immune system they run a whole bunch of other risks. Also cell therapies right now are one of the weakest markets in Biotechs due to the level of costs to develop. This is slightly different since it's Allogenic, but the market seems not very invested in cell therapy.
- ejstronge 1y ago> This is very encouraging, but will take a long time to get to any type of usable treatment because these cells are literally made to evade the immune system they run a whole bunch of other risks. Also cell therapies right now are one of the weakest markets in Biotechs due to the level of costs to develop. This is slightly different since it's Allogenic, but the market seems not very invested in cell therapy. If we're controlling the cells' genomes (which we are), we can add any sort of killswitch (see another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45220068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45220068 ) that we would like, and this would function better than relying on host immune surveillance. The opposite could be done, making insulin release dependent on the presence of a harmless drug, e.g., insulin release can only happen if a designer steroid molecule is present in the blood. There are already cell therapies that envisage permanent implantation of modified cells, so I am not sure why a long delay for 'any type of usable treatment' would occur. The structure of this need not be analogous to a stem cell transplant; you could imagine injecting new cells intramuscularly every few months. The costs to develop this are incurred during development (unlike the autologous therapies that require extensive, expert-level analysis for each new patient). I'm not sure that we can compare the current levels of investment in autologous gene editing to this product.
- inglor_cz 1y ago"you could imagine injecting new cells intramuscularly every few months" So, a subscription... ouch. I get the medical advantages, but it still sounds as easily abusable economically.
- DarwinsToffees 1y ago
- umvi 1y agoThis is great news. Any type of pancreatic function restoration is also potentially good for Type 1.5 (which constitute a sizable chunk of misdiagnosed T2Ds) where the body attacks more slowly (over the course of years) instead of acutely like traditional T1D and so doctors assume it's insulin resistance instead of pancreatic function decline since they both present with the same symptom - hyperglycemia.
- tracker1 1y agoIt would be nice if fasting insulin and other markers were tested more regularly beyond fasted glucose and a1c, since those can vary for other reasons. Not to mention catching those developing insulin resistance potentially years ahead.
- thecosas 1y agoThere are also loads of tests for antibodies now; some are even (gasp) free for qualifying people. More here: https://www.breakthrought1d.org/early-detection/#screening-options https://www.breakthrought1d.org/early-detection/#screening-o...
- consp 1y agoA1c is simple, easy, reliable and readily available. You might not spot the early signs with T2 due to natural variations but it's definitely a good test for T1. Don't rule it out completely.
- mnw21cam 1y agoAgreed mostly. It's a great test. There is a slight complication because it depends on the amount of glycation "damage" that the red blood cells receive over their lifetime of a few months, so if a patient has a condition that means their red blood cells have a non-standard lifetime (for example if they have sickle cell disease) then the HbA1c measurement becomes non-standard as well. The other thing a HbA1c measurement isn't so good for is detecting blood sugar spikes (which are really bad for you) and distinguishing that from a constant slightly higher blood sugar level (which isn't such a big deal). For instance, there's a reasonably rare condition called GCK MODY which causes the body to have a slightly higher blood glucose "set level", which shows up very clearly on a HbA1c measurement, tends to get clinicians to panic, and gets patients put on drugs or insulin which they do not need and in fact is harmful to them. My lab does many genetic tests for this condition (among others) and a fairly common message back to the clinician is to take them off all treatment.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rcgy 1y agoThat's really exciting news. There's a couple non-immunosuppressed solutions being tested, hopefully one pans out.
- thecosas 1y agoYep, I think vertex is one of the companies trying to tackle an encapsulated set of insulin producing cells. Neat stuff!
- ejstronge 1y agoHere's a list of all the biosimilar products in this space: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12401705/#s4 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12401705/#s4
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gwerbret 1y agoThis study's pretty wild -- but this approach has a major downside that they only mentioned in passing in the actual report in the New England Journal of Medicine (paywalled, unfortunately). To gene-edit these cells, they had to use a lentivirus vector -- a (limited form of a) class of viruses that notably includes HIV. These viral vectors work by splicing themselves into random places in the host cell's DNA. Which is fine, except that there's a non-zero chance that in the process, the virus will initiate a cancer. When you combine that with a cell deliberately engineered to hide from the immune system, you have the ticket to a very bad time.
- Spacecosmonaut 1y agoOne would probably engineer these cells with a killswitch, such as doxycycline induced Caspase9 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1895037/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1895037/. The transgene engineering is totally possible without a viral vector. We engineer cells all the time with recombinase based editing methods for targeted safe harbor insertion of transgenes https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-024-01227-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-024-01227-1. This stuff just permeates through the community slowly.
- JackeJR 1y agoN=1 study should not have made it into headlines. > Although the research marks a milestone in the search for treatments of type 1 diabetes, it’s important to note that the study involved one one participant, who received a low dose of cells for a short period—not enough for the patient to no longer need to control their blood sugar with injected insulin. An editorial by the journal Nature also says that some independent research groups have failed in their efforts to confirm that Sana’s method provides edited cells with the ability to evade the immune system.
- thecosas 1y agoDespite that, glad to see it in a human subject. I’ve had T1D for more than 30 years and have seen every headline under the sun with a “cure” always sometime in the next 5 years, so my expectations are properly tempered. Still excited by it but a long way from clinics handing this out as a solution (if it’s viable).
- JackeJR 1y agoThe thing is that with such a sample, we don't really know 1. If the effect is real. i.e. had the patient not been given the injection, would his/her condition improve spontaneously. 2. Assuming the effect is real, what are the circumstances that make the treatment work for this person. Not to be overly dismissive of the good work but it is too early to be optimistic about this given the above and the fact that the results were not replicated out of Sana suggest that there is a lot that we need to work out before this becomes a viable treatment for the masses. The harms of hyping this up is that readers will get their hopes up and then be disappointed when things don't pan out as do most scientific endeavours. Overtime, readers will learn to distrust anything that is being reported because 90% of which do not translate to real world impact. It is hard to get the nuance that "science takes many many failures and iterations" to the public and the more likely outcome of such reporting is general distrust of science when things don't go the way that is hoped for.
- malfist 1y agoType 1 diabetes does not spontaneously resolve
- wallopinski 1y ago[dead]