β-Cell transplantation : a risk of insulin overproduction ?

β-Cell transplantation : a risk of insulin overproduction ?

Albert Hwa, Operations Director at the Joslin’s Center for Cell-Based Therapy for Diabetes (CCTD) and Lecturer the Harvard Medical School, discusses the view according to which transplanting too much beta cells is not an issue in cell therapy.

Transcript: 

If you have more cells, since they are going to respond to the glucose in the blood, you don’t fear to the same extent the risk of overdose, so to speak. How do you feel about that ? Yeah I think it’s provided that you make sure that the cells are truly physiological. There is a potential risk of overproduction, or over-secretion of insulin.


And I think actually, you know, some papers have suggested that that’s one of the potential concerns when you transplant a really large dose of cells within a device, and then the speed at which the insulin comes out of the device, if it’s very very slow, then you know you have this delayed effect where your sugar may have already started to come down and then you see a really big increase in insulin. And then you would drive the sugar level really low. And so those are all issues that will need to be studied really carefully.

 

So there there is something about the availability and the closeness between the blood and the graft, so that there is no huge delays between the response of the cells, the response on the blood levels and a risk of overshoot in insulin.