theHRguyCommunist China Just Cured Diabetes and America's Insulin Industry is Not Happy About it
JännätThat’s pretty incredible. I wonder if the patients will have to get more insulin-producing cells transplanted every few years, or if this is a “one and done” type of deal?
In any case, an autologous cell transplant every ≥3 years or so is a vast improvement over the current situation for type 2 diabetes
owseiIIRC the biologist that runs the YT channel Though Emporium did this some years ago regarding his lactose intolerance and he had to get more after some years because his body didn’t naturally produce them
But I hope this is different
elbuchoThis is a different matter entirely. The person who runs that channel (I love that channel, btw) does not have functional genes to produce lactase (the enzyme that lyses the bonds in lactose). Either he can’t make any lactase, or he can only make insufficient quantities of it.
What he did was introduce lactase producing bacteria into his small intestine. This required him to kill off most of his gut flora and then repopulate it with compatible species, including some lactase producers. So it’s not exactly correct to say that he cured himself of lactose intolerance; he just got something to create lactase for him. He had to repeat the therapy years later because his gut flora changed over time (likely due to shifts in his diet), and the quantity of little lactase producing bacterial buddies living in his intestines declined.
SwedneckThis is blatantly incorrect to a degree that i’d call it an outright lie, spending 30 seconds looking it up would show you that his video is literally titled “I Genetically Engineered MYSELF to Fix Lactose Intolerance”.
Shit - you know what? You’re right. It’s been a while since I saw the video, and I had it mixed up in my mind with a similar video I saw of a guy doing a fecal transplant to fix his lactose intolerance. I went back to check the Thought Emporium video, and yeah - he used a retrovirus to introduce the E. coli lacZ gene into his small intestine’s brush border cells. That’s my bad; sorry about the misinfo. You’re right in that I could have easily looked it up, but I went from memory instead, and it was… unreliable.
That virus will insert randomly into the genome. Huge risk of cancer, assuming it isn’t total bullshit like all of YouTube
lactose intolerance is a very very different thing from diabetes.
Insulin is a fundamental part of keeping you alive, and if you fuck up the balance you can die which is why diabetes is such a big deal.
Lactose intolerance is just the inability to digest a specific kind of sugar, which means bacteria in your digestive system can gorge themselves and give you an absurd amount of gas and other very unpleasant but ultimately not particularly dangerous consequences.
This experiment was done on a type 2 diabetes patient. Type 2 diabetes is characterized by damaged islet cells due to a diet high in glucose / carbohydrates. Changing the diet won’t undo the damage, it will just not cause further damage. This patient had enteric neuronal stem cells (nerve tissue from the gut) extracted, and those extracted cells were induced to differentiate into pancreatic islet cells in vitro (in a lab). Once differentiated, they were transplanted back into the patient, and they were able to successfully implant into his pancreas and repair some of the damage his diet had caused.
If the patient had type 1 diabetes, this would not be an effective therapy, as the issue in type 1 diabetes is that the body’s own immune system attacks the cells. A similar approach has been tested for type 1 diabetes, and it has seen some success when combined with immune suppressant drugs to limit the damage caused by the autoimmune disorder.
Since this patient had type 2, however, theoretically he should not need additional therapy as long as he does not go back to a destructive diet or suffer trauma to his pancreas due to accidents.