Over the last year, our research has led to exciting breakthrough development of a device that when places under the skin, cures all animals with diabetes and hold a great promise to cure diabetes.
The device contains insulin producing cells which it protects from the body's immune system without the need of toxic drug doses to prevent rejection. Work now must be done to bring this to research to human studies.
Research has led to the development of macroencapsulation system that has successfully overcome many of the biocompatibility challenges that current research in cell macroencapsulation systems faces.
Thus far, data has shown that this system was able to cure diabetes in 100% of animals for over 3 months, by inhibiting allorejection of transplanted insulin producing cells.
The system co-encapsulates cells along with a novel, tunable ,polymeric drug-delivery system that releases very low doses of immunosuppressive drugs over an extended period of time to inhibit allorejection locally versus systemically (i.e this system obviates the toxic effects associated with generalized immunosuppression)
Furthermore, this novel macroencapsulation device was powerful enough to inhibit allorejection and restore euglycemia in diabetic mice previously presensitized with injection of insulin producing cells.