Diabetes is a struggle that many people in the world, especially in America, must deal with. Every day, hundreds of people die to such a crippling disease. With a disease as powerful as crippling or even completely stopping the body from producing insulin to balance out one's blood sugar, the disease only becomes more and more deadly over time if not looked after correctly. People suffering from diabetes have to battle with keeping their blood sugar balanced as well as the constant administration of insulin via various methods such as injections, pumps, and/or oral medication. It's a disease that's tough for the one's suffering and can have a lasting effect on those around them, but scientists have made a great discovery for diabetes in rats, and we can only hope that soon humans will get to have the same cure.
According to The Verge, the cure for diabetes in rats was found due to cells that were grown inside them. Specifically, mouse pancreas cells were grown in rats and transferred to mice to technically reverse the diabetes. Through these means, it shows that this possibility could be done and be applied for humans, meaning that creating human organs could be done inside animals like pigs or sheep and could be transferred back into those in dire need. By engineering rats to lack a gene that's needed to developing the organ, scientists were able to inject mouse stem cells that could develop into any tissue or organ in the body. When the embryos had some time to grow in the rats, the rats had a pancreas almost made up entirely of mouse cells.
Quartz claims that every transplant organs from humans to humans needed to use a hight amount of drugs that suppress the immune system. With the newest study of organs transferred from rats to mice, it showed that the drugs were only given five days after the transplant. This does not mean, however, that everything has been figured out. There are various amounts of obstacles standing in the way of finding a real cure for diabetes, and so far scientists have really only scratched the surface. This does, however, provide great potential for applying this process to other animals, waiting for the organ to mature, and then transplanting it to a human in need of a new pancreas. While diabetics aren't clearly out of the water yet, it still gives a lot of hope for a cure in the future.
