LONDON - British doctors announced Wednesday they had cured a 61-year-old man who had suffered from the most extreme form of diabetes for over 30 years by injecting pancreatic cells into his liver.
The operation, the first completely successful transplant of so-called islet cells in Britain, builds on and amplifies pioneering research in Canada, and offers hopes for patients with this potentially lethal disease around the world, they said.
Professor Stephanie Amiel, a consultant in diabetes at King's College Hospital where the breakthrough treatment was carried out, said the achievement was "hugely exciting".
"The implications for the future are enormous. Eventually this could mean the end of insulin dependence for all Type 1 diabetes sufferers," Amiel said.
Diabetes is caused by a problem with insulin, a hormone that stimulates the body's cells into absorbing the energy source glucose from the blood.
Insulin is produced by one of two classes of islet cells, which exist in the pancreas, a hand-sized organ located behind the stomach.
Type 1 diabetes develops in early childhood, when the immune system destroys these beta-class islet cells, leaving the patient with a lifelong dependency on insulin injections.
Insulin deficiency can lead to heart and blood disorders that are responsible for an estimated 50 to 80 percent of the deaths that occur among diabetics.
People with severe forms of the disease can also suffer from blindness, kidney failure and the risk of limb amputation because of poor blood circulation.
The big step forward has been the discovery that islet cells, harvested from the pancreases of dead organ donors, can work if they are injected into the liver.
The transplant requires a simple, minimally invasive procedure that takes only about 45 minutes. Once there, the cells develop their own blood supply and start producing insulin.
In this case, the delighted patient, who received three injections, is now producing his own insulin and is free from hypoglycaemia, a sugar imbalance that is at the core of diabetic symptoms, King's College Hospital said in a press release.
The technique is still experimental -- two previous British transplants have resulted in partial but not complete independence from insulin injections -- and is critically dependent on islet cell donations, said Amiel.
"In its current state of technology... islet transplantation is not perfect. We do not have enough organ donors, therefore we cannot extract enough islets to help all Type 1 patients," she cautioned.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva said last May around 3.2 million people die of diabetes each year, a toll that was triple the previous estimates.
At least 171 million people have the disease, and the tally is likely to double by 2030, according to a combined estimate by the WHO and the International Diabetes Federation.
The other form of diabetes, Type 2, occurs when insulin is produced but at insufficient levels or does not work efficiently, either because it is defective in some way or the cells themselves become resistant to it.
Type 2 diabetes accounts for about 90 percent of all cases and usually shows up in adults aged 40 or above. Incidence of this disease has rocketed alongside rates of obesity, triggered by consumption of sweet and fatty foods and a sedentary lifestyle.
On Tuesday, a specialist British journal, Gut, reported that older people with diabetes are between two and three times likelier to develop liver cancer than non-diabetics.
03/09/2005 12:11 GMT