Diabetes Treatment: New Cryopreservation Protocol Increases the Supply of Pancreatic Islets

A new method of cryopreserving pancreatic islets, developed by a team of bioengineers at the University of Minnesota, is a breakthrough in treating and curing diabetes. The technique, documented in the journal Nature Medicine, revolutionizes the supply chain for isolating, allocating, and storing pancreatic islets before tra

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nsplanting them into patients. By pooling donated cryopreserved islets from multiple pancreases, the method will not only allow more patients to be treated but will also make the best use of valuable donor cells.

The team from the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic was able to store small encapsulated droplets of islet cells at very low temperatures for nine months and then by using new heating techniques, bring them back to their original state before transplantation.

It will soon be possible to transplant islet cells on-demand, the researchers wrote in their press release. This is an important and valuable advance in view of the growing incidence of diabetes, whose treatment is more about controlling the disease than curing it.

Curing diabetes rather than controlling it: Islet cell transplantation, in which groups of cells are removed from a healthy pancreas and transferred to a recipient so that it can resume its own insulin production, is now one of the most important areas of research that aims to cure diabetes. However, transplants from a single donor are often insufficient to restore autonomous insulin production in the recipient. Two or three infusions are needed and there is a risk of side effects, especially with multiple cycles of immunosuppression.

By pooling small islets from multiple donors, it is possible to give the recipient several groups of cells from different donors in a single infusion. However, this process requires that small islets can be stored safely for long periods.

The new cryopreservation technique solves these problems by allowing long-term storage of cells that can be pooled and used for a single transplant. This work shows that the new technique allows a high survival rate and good functionality of the cells (90% for mouse islet cells and about 87% for porcine and human islet cells), even after 9 months of storage. These data suggest that this new cryopreservation protocol may be an effective way to improve the islet cell supply chain, allowing the pooling of islet cells from multiple donors and thus improving transplantation outcomes to cure diabetes.

This cryopreservation protocol, which demonstrates its feasibility here, can thus address a major medical challenge, namely curing diabetes. The protocol paves the way for the transplantation of islet cells, which has been promising but not yet feasible.

References

Pancreatic islet cryopreservation by vitrification achieves high viability, function, recovery, and clinical scalability for transplantation

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