Getting diabetes is more or less something that sticks with you throughout your entire life. Sometimes it is manageable, while in other cases it can be downright inconvenient as it means having to keep an insulin pen on you at all times, or constantly having to go for treatments and checkups.However thanks to recent clinical trials, it seems that researchers have come up with a potential “cure” for the disease. This involves implanting pancreatic islet cells in the patient’s omentum, which is the tissue that covers abdominal organs. Now this isn’t the first time that researchers have worked towards creating a cure for Type 1 Diabetes, but what makes this particular treatment more effective is that it results in long-term insulin independence.
This means that patients who require constant/regular doses of injected or pumped insulin will not require them quite as much anymore. Prior to this, islets were implanted in the liver which caused inflammation, but by implanting it in the gut, it appears to be more effective and requires minimally invasive surgery.
According to the lead author of the study, David Baidal, “The results thus far have shown that the omentum appears to be a viable site for islet implantation using this new platform technique. Data from our study and long-term follow up of additional omental islet transplants will determine the safety and feasibility of this strategy of islet transplantation, but we are quite excited about what we are seeing now.”