Diabetics to benefit from revolutionary treatment (From The Northern Echo)

Diabetics to benefit from revolutionary treatment

1:46am Tuesday 12th February 2008 in News By Barry Nelson, Health Editor

DIABETIC patients in the North-East are likely to be among the first to benefit from a revolutionary new way of treating the disease.

The Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust has been named as one of six centres in the UK where the new treatment will be offered to patients with Type One diabetes.

The six centres are to receive government funding to develop a transplant programme involving transplanting insulin-producing cells called the islets of Langerhans from a donated pancreas into the liver of a patient with Type One diabetes.

The transplant is much easier than a conventional organ transplant and once they are in place the cells get to work producing insulin.

This allows patients who may have been injecting insulin for all of their lives to produce their own insulin and get back to near normal life.

In time the new treatment has the potential to transform the lives of thousands of people with Type One, which usually develops in childhood and is unconnected with lifestyle factors, such as obesity.

"This is absolutely brilliant news and it is great that one of the transplant centres will be here in the North-East."

Linda Wood, Diabetes UK

So far, only a handful of the transplants have been carried out in the UK.

People with type One diabetes fail to produce enough insulin or cannot use it properly, which means they have to rely on injecting insulin.

Today's announcement of the new programme by Health Minister Ann Keen will see government funding given to two islet isolation laboratories from April 1 One will be in London, run jointly by King's College Hospital and The Royal Free, while the second will be based in Oxford.

They will receive donor pancreases and prepare islet cells for transplantation.

The two laboratories will supply Newcastle and the other five centres with islet cells when required.

King's College performed the UK's first clinically successful islet transplantation in a Type One diabetes patient in 2005.

Currently the procedure will be aimed at diabetics who are at risk of hypoglycaemia, a condition produced by low levels of blood sugar which can cause comas or who have had kidney transplants.

Linda Wood, manager for Diabetes UK in the North-East and Yorkshire said she was thrilled that the charity had been involved in finding the research which had led to this breakthrough.

"This is absolutely brilliant news and it is great that one of the transplant centres will be here in the North-East."