Edinburgh develops promising diabetes treatment with new centre

Edinburgh will become home to a laboratory which provides revolutionary new treatment for those suffering from Type 1 diabetes, and will see the treatment performed for the first time in the coming months.

The Scottish Islet Isolation Laboratory will operate 24 hours a day, offering the new cell transplant treatment, which extracts islets—cells which produce insulin—from a donated pancreas and inject them into the liver of someone with Type 1 diabetes, and those who have received a kidney transplant.

The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service's associate medical director, Professor Marc Turner, said the new technique would end the need to do the "high-risk surgical procedure" of a pancreas transplant.

He told BBC News: "The majority of people in Scotland with diabetes control it with diet and drugs.

"However, some have great difficulty in controlling their diabetes as their blood sugar swings up and down, so this development should enable us to offer a way of controlling their diabetes more successfully.

"For those patients who do need a pancreas transplant, which is a high-risk surgical procedure, it will be a much more straight-forward and safe procedure."

Islet cell transplants were pioneered by University of Pittsburgh researchers who developed the Edmonton protocol, the standard method for the treatment. Advances in medical science have only recently made the procedure possible on a wider scale.

John Casey, lead clinician for the Islet Cell Programme, said: "Islet isolation is a new and highly skilled technique which can prove life-saving for some patients who are unaware of the level of sugar in their blood."

The Islet Transplant Programme in Edinburgh aims to treat around a dozen patients in its first year, but the number will depend on organ donors.

"This technique depends on organ donors, but work at the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine at Edinburgh university gives hope that in the not too distant future islets will be able to be produced from stem cells," said Mr Casey.

The Edinburgh programme is unique because of the close collaboration with the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, which could make organ donations unnecessary.

The Centre for Regenerative Medicine focuses on the therapeutic use of lab-made cells, and has recently been credited with playing a major part in making Britain the global epicentre of stem cell research.