Crispr Offers New Hope for Treating Diabetes

"Crispr gene-editing technology has demonstrated its revolutionary potential in recent years: It has been used to treat rare diseases, to adapt crops to withstand the extremes of climate change, or even to change the color of a spider's web. But the greatest hope is that this technology will help find a cure for a global disease, such as diabetes. A new study points in that direction."

"For the first time, researchers succeeded in implanting Crispr-edited pancreatic cells in a man with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Without insulin, the body is then unable to regulate blood sugar. If steps aren't taken to manage glucose levels by other means (typically, by injecting insulin), this can lead to damage to the nerves and organs-particularly the heart, kidneys, and eyes. Roughly 9.5 million people worldwide have type 1 diabetes."

"The study, published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, details the step-by-step procedure. First, pancreatic islet cells were taken from a deceased donor without diabetes, and then altered with the gene-editing technique Crispr-Cas12b to allow them to evade the immune response of the diabetes patient. Cells altered like this are said to be "hypoimmune," explains Sonja Schrepfer, a professor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California and the scientific cofounder of Sana Biotechnology, the company that developed this treatment."

Crispr-Cas12b was used to edit pancreatic islet cells taken from a deceased donor to create hypoimmune cells that evade immune detection. The edited cells were implanted into the forearm muscle of a man with type 1 diabetes without administering immunosuppressive drugs. The implanted cells produced insulin for months after implantation and showed no signs of rejection at 12 weeks. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which immune attack destroys insulin-producing pancreatic cells, causing life-threatening glucose dysregulation and long-term organ damage. Approximately 9.5 million people worldwide have type 1 diabetes.

Read at WIRED