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Function and Viability of Human Islets Encapsulated in Alginate Sheets: The Poster
June 19th, 2011
Soon I am off to the ADA meeting in San Diego that starts Friday. So I’ll give you a report on what the diabetes clinicians know after the conference.
So this week a little supplement on the IPITA conference in Prague (see previous post). Some people let me know they want to see the poster in the background of the photo of Jon Lakey and Rick Storrs. So here it is.
(Click here to download a high definition PDF: Prague IPITA Human Islet Sheet Poster)
What attracted the most notice is the reaction of the rat’s body to the Islet Sheets. The two photographs at the top center show an Islet Sheet at the time of implant and 4 weeks later. (We have results now at 8 weeks that are similar.) The transparent, vascularized tissue surrounding the sheets does not look at all like what others see with their devices when implanted under the skin of rats.
A senior histologist in the islet field was pretty excited, and asked to do his own histology, an encouraging sign.
Another pleasing result is in the bottom table, showing that the islets in the sheets showed no decline in viability after 2 weeks, while islet in islets sheets in laboratory culture lost viability over the same time. In plain language islets in islet sheets do better when the sheets are in rats than in culture.
Finally, notice that that these are human islets in rats: a xenograft. Current opinion is that we should have a major tissue reaction in this strain of rat. We don’t.
All in all, an encouraging rat result.
