Transplants and Diabetes
Transplants and DiabetesThree Toronto scientists have developed an organ transplant procedure that could, among its many benefits, reverse diabetes. The procedure was developed by Bernard Leibel, Julio Martin and Walter Zingg at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children. The story of their work began in 1978, when they delved into research which had never before been tried. They wanted to determine if the success rate of organ transplants would increase if the recipient was injected with minute amounts of organ tissue prior to the transplant. The intention was to adapt the recipient to the transplanted tissue and thereby raise the threshold of rejection. In the case of the diabetes experiment, this meant injecting rats with pancreatic tissue before transplanting islets of Langerhans, small clusters of cells scattered throughout the pancreas which produce insulin, glucagon, and somatostatin. In their first experiment, outbred Wistar rats were injected with increasing amounts of minced pancreas from unrelated donor rats for one year while a control group was left untreated. Then both the treated and control groups received injections of approximately 500-800 islets of Langerhans from unrelated donors. Of the five treated animals, two became clinically and biochemically permanently normal. Six months later, Martin examined the cured rats and found intact, functioning islets...
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