( upport cells. But a group at the Salk I...)Stem cells from brain transformed to produce insulin at Stanford

Working with the cells in a lab dish, Kim and postdoctoral fellow Yuichi Hori, MD, PhD, now an associate professor at Kobe University in Japan, added a cocktail of chemicals in a sequence that they knew might prod the stem cells to mature into insulin-producing cells. After some trial and error, they found the right combination and sequence. The end result was a dish full of cells that could produce insulin and release it in response to sugar added to the environment.

These cells don't perfectly mimic human islet cells. Kim's cells made some, but not all, proteins normally made by islet cells, and they continued to make some proteins found in neurons. Nonetheless, the fact that they could respond to sugar by producing insulin was exciting.

Kim's next step was to find out if the cells could perform the same feat in a mouse. The group transplanted the cells into a cavity in the kidney where other types of insulin-producing cells have been found to survive. When the blood sugar went up in these mice, the cells once again released insulin. After four weeks the cells had survived, continued to produce insulin and had not changed into other cell types or formed tumors.

Kim noted that the amount of insulin produced wasn't enough to effectively treat diabetes. Still, the work is a first step towards that eventual goal. It also hints that neuronal stem cells have many potential uses beyond treating brain disease.

He thinks this work has additional value because the method used to produce insulin from neural stem cells is completely new. "The more ways we discover to form insulin-producing cells from stem cells, the more likely it is that stem cells can b
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Source:Stanford University Medical Center