One promising approach to treating type 1 diabetes is implanting pancreatic islet cells that can produce insulin when needed, which can free patients from giving themselves frequent insulin injections. However, one major obstacle to this approach is that once the cells are implanted, they eventually run out of oxygen and stop producing insulin.
To overcome that hurdle, MIT engineers have designed a new implantable device that not only carries hundreds of thousands of insulin-producing islet cells, but also has its own on-board oxygen factory, which generates oxygen by splitting water vapor found in the body.
. The research team also includes several other researchers from MIT, including Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute, as well as researchers from Boston Children's Hospital.Most patients with type 1 diabetes have to monitor their blood glucose levels carefully and inject themselves with insulin at least once a day. However, this process doesn't replicate the body's natural ability to control blood glucose levels.
More recently, researchers have shown similar success with islet cells derived from stem cells, but patients who receive those cells also need to take immunosuppressive drugs., is to encapsulate the transplanted cells within a flexible device that protects the cells from the immune system. However, finding a reliable oxygen supply for these encapsulated cells has proven challenging.
The MIT team took a different approach that could potentially generate oxygen indefinitely, by splitting water. This is done using a proton-exchange membrane—a technology originally deployed to generate hydrogen in fuel cells—located within the device. This membrane can split water vapor into hydrogen, which diffuses harmlessly away, and oxygen, which goes into a storage chamber that feeds the islet cells through a thin, oxygen-permeable membrane.
Typically when any kind of medical device is implanted in the body, attack by the immune system leads to a buildup of scar tissue called fibrosis, which can reduce the devices' effectiveness. This kind of scar tissue did form around the implants used in this study, but the device's success in controllingsuggests that insulin was still able to diffuse out of the device, and glucose into it.
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