2017-04-02 08:20:27
In these troubled days, a bad lifestyle is more dangerous than poor economic and hygienic conditions.
Diabetes is one of the most prevalent diseases of Humanity. It is estimated that, in 2015, around 415 million people were diabetic. The number of deaths due to this disease is estimated at about five million a year. 90% of diabetes cases are type 2, which is characterized by the development of resistance to the action of insulin, resistance that prevents cells from incorporating glucose from the external environment.
Today, diabetes is an incurable disease, particularly type 1 diabetes, since in this case the beta cells of the pancreas have been completely eliminated by the attack of the patient’s own immune system, which has confused the cells of the pancreas with foreign organisms and has eliminated them.
One of the strategies that has been investigated to try to generate new insulin-producing pancreatic cells has been the manipulation of stem cells so that they develop into these types of adult cells. Another attractive possibility is the manipulation of adult cells. This could be the case for insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells and liver cells.
Let us remember that all the cells of an organism have the same genome, the difference between some cells and others resides, therefore, in what information they use and what information they keep unused. So if we could force a liver cell to stop using the genetic information that makes it a liver cell and start using the genetic information that would make it an insulin-producing pancreatic cell, we might be able to cure diabetes by of a cellular transformation.
Researchers at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine decided to study this possibility. A few years ago, analysis of the genes that were functioning in the embryonic precursor cells of liver and pancreatic cells revealed the presence of a protein that controls the functioning of numerous other genes. This protein, called TIGF2, works at high levels in cells that become pancreatic, but stops working in cells that become liver.
Now, the researchers are studying whether forcing TIGF2 to function in liver cells could turn them into pancreas. Using molecular biology techniques, they introduce this gene into liver cells and observe that these actually begin to undergo a transformation: they now begin to resemble pancreatic cells from the point of view of the genes that work in them and the genes that they leave behind. to do it.
However, the transformation does not end here. If these semi-transformed cells are transplanted into the pancreas of diabetic animals, the cellular environment of this pancreas leads to further progress towards insulin-producing beta cells, although this transformation is not yet fully achieved.
More information on Jorge Laborda’s Blog: Antidiabetic Cellular Reprogramming
Referencias: Nuria Cerdá-Esteban, el al. Stepwise reprogramming of liver cells to a pancreas progenitor state by the transcriptional regulator Tgif2.
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