Cell transplants for diabetes 60 pct successful

Just under 60 percent of diabetes patients who have received an experimental transplant of pancreatic cells are able to live without insulin injections a year later, Canadian and U.S. doctors reported on Tuesday.

Researchers at 12 medical centers in the United States and Canada reported on 86 patients with type 1 diabetes in the first annual report of the Collaborative Islet Transplant Registry.

The report, on the Internet at www.citregistry.org, shows that 61 percent of patients who got the transplants no longer had to inject insulin six months later. This fell to 58 percent after a year.

"We now have much-needed information on the short-term results of islet transplantation," said Dr. Thomas Eggerman of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, one of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which funded the project.

"Our goal is to collect data on both short- and long-term outcomes for all patients who receive islet transplants so we can better define the overall risks and benefits of this exciting but still experimental procedure," Eggerman added in a statement.

Type 1 diabetes affects an estimated 1 million people in the United States alone. It is caused when the body mistakenly destroys the cells in the pancreas, called islet cells, that produce insulin.

The incurable disease is usually first diagnosed in childhood and patients must carefully monitor their blood sugar levels, injecting insulin as needed to help their bodies metabolize food.

Diabetes can cause blindness, nerve damage leading to limb loss, kidney failure, coma and death.

For the islet cell transplants, the insulin-producing cells are taken from the bodies of people who have died of other causes and infused through a major vein to the liver.

If the transplant works, the cells live inside the liver and do their work there.

Between 1990 and 1999, only 8 percent of islet transplants worked well enough to render patients insulin-free for a year or more.

In 2000 Dr. James Shapiro at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, pioneered a new technique now called the Edmonton protocol, which works much better.