Chinese scientists achieve diabetes cure through innovative cell therapy, detailed in Cell Discovery. Patient, treated in July 2021, no longer requires insulin after eleven weeks, and is now medication-free for 33 months. The breakthrough, praised by Timothy Kieffer, signifies a major advancement in diabetes treatment. This novel approach utilizes the body's regenerative abilities and could alleviate China's healthcare burden. Further studies are needed for validation.
  • @tooLikeTheNope@lemmy.ml
    17•11 months ago

    Oh crap! If this is true then avoid spending a ton of money in insulin supplies each year could give an actual reason to politicians for reducing the healthcare state budget, which they normally do at every occasion just without a proper explanation… I don’t know if my mind is ready for rationality in politics /s

  • @Etterra@lemmy.world
    4•11 months ago

    What are the odds we’ll get this in America in the next 20 years? Or that insurance will cover it? I mean we live in for-profit medical hell. They actually have weight loss drugs that like 7/10ths of Americans need, but a month’s worth cost over $1,000 out of pocket. Insulin is already stupidly overpriced and there’s no financial incentive to cure it, so why would they? The insurance and pharma companies aren’t in the business of helping people. If they were there be non-proffits (for a start). Instead they get as much federal subsidy money as possible and then still charge $1,000 a month that insurance might cover if you’re lucky or rich enough to even have any that’s worth a damn.

    So yeah, cool story, but here in America this won’t make any difference. Maybe in 50 years it’ll be affordable, we’ll see.

  • DarthYoshiBoy
    34•11 months ago

    So this is neat. Potentially life changing for some type 2 diabetics, but that depends because some t2 diabetics are not failing to make enough insulin, they’re just no longer sensitive to it at a level that makes it functional for them. I suppose it’s possible that this therapy could cause them to grow enough islet β cells to overcome their lack of sensitivity, but (and I’m a type 1, not a type 2, so maybe my info is incorrect here) that lack of sensitivity can grow with further exposure to insulin making this a stop-gap at best for those cases absent other therapies.

    …and with all of that said, being able to regrow islet β cells has never really been the problem for type 1 diabetes. You can regrow all the islet β cells you’d like and it’s not going to cure the underlying immune disease that has caused your immune system to kill off all of your islet β cells to begin with. Unless you can figure out why t1 diabetes causes one’s own immune system to go psycho killer on their islet β cells, you’ve done nothing to “cure” diabetes. Without being able to suppress that impulse for your immune system to murder your own cells, any ability to replace the islet β cells is going to be temporary at best, and probably a waste on the whole.

    My brother in law is a “cured” type 1 diabetic, by virtue of his having had a kidney replacement and being on immune suppressing drugs for that. Since they were already replacing the kidney and he was going to have to take immune system suppression medications for that, they also just replaced his pancreas at the same time and the suppression of his immune system has allowed the new pancreas to thrive and continue to make insulin. Easy-peasy. The only trade-off is that he is super immunocompromised and can be killed by common colds, so not a great strategy in general.

  • fiat_lux
    132•11 months ago

    Hm, 5 year old journal, with the editor board, funding and half of the authors all from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but significant hospital contribution. I remain skeptical of the headline but hopeful of the science.

  • @SeattleRain@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9•11 months ago

    Why is everyone online so incredulous of this breakthrough? Is it just Sinophobia or are there reasons to doubt Chinese medical findings?

    • @ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
      43•11 months ago

      There’s reason to doubt all sensationalist medical headlines

      But this is 1 patient, no long term effects studied (just doesn’t need insulin injections), and hasn’t been validated

      Nothing to do with China

    • @Raiderkev@lemmy.world
      -18•11 months ago

      Their Covid vaxx was trash. My aunt’s friend was a UAE resident, and got sinovac Covid shot. He later caught and died from covid, so that’s my anecdotal reason not to trust it, but if it is true, this would be a great thing.

    • shameless
      17•11 months ago

      I mean it is… They could literally have a cure that they can sell to millions of people around the world, as well as millions more who will contract diabetes in the future.

      I don’t understand this conspiracy and companies don’t want cures. I can understand scepticism around pharmaceutical companies for all the awful shit they’ve done, but it doesn’t mean that scientists and researchers will never be able to produce cures.

      • @Asafum@feddit.nl
        9•11 months ago

        I don’t exactly subscribe to the conspiracy but I can understand it as it’s related to “planned obsolescence.” Companies don’t want to sell you a quality product that will last “forever” they want to sell you something that’s just good enough to work for a bit, but will absolutely break or be replaced very soon so you become a repeat customer as opposed to a one time customer.

        The same logic applies here with the medication, why would they sell something once even if there were new future customers, if they could instead have everyone on a “subscription” of sorts?

        The conspiracy exists because we see it play out in every other facet of our society/economy. Everything is becoming a subscription, you don’t own anything, every product a corporation makes is almost complete garbage, etc… I’m not sure I believe it 100% but I wouldn’t in the slightest bit be surprised to find out that actually was the case.

        • @pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4•11 months ago

          There is no grand secret conspiracy. Why? The more people involved in a conspiracy, the more likely it will leak out. A conspiracy between two people may never get it, a conspiracy between a hundred people will have someone slip up in a few years at most, but an international conspiracy involving millions of people with disparate interests wouldn’t stay secret for a second.

          What we’re seeing isn’t a conspiracy as such. It’s a conversation happening in the open about “business models” and “revenue streams”. It’s also based on customer expectations. There are definitely markets out there for the repairable, buy it for life goods, but there’s just not nearly as big as the customer who upgrades their phone every two years. But obviously that’s going to be different for diabetes. Reliably being able to repair pancreatic cells would be huge. If the companies selling insulin tried to internally stifle research to avoid cannibalizing their insulin business, other companies have an enormous incentive to take a crack at it.

      • @Valmond@lemmy.world
        3•11 months ago

        Yeah and there are other parts of the world where researchers search for stuff like this too. If it works it will being fame and money to the inventors and then the drug exists and can ve sold.

      • @matcha_addict@lemy.lolEnglish
        0•11 months ago

        Pharma investors have a solid position and are already racking big profits from the continuous model of insulin treatments. A cure would be a detriment to their profits, so it’s not something they’re interested in funding.

        No investor nowadays thinks a one-time-payment product is worthwhile. We’re already way past that.

        This isn’t to mention that if you were an investor who decided you wanted to go ahainst that, that the other mega corporations (with more funds than most of those 5% individuals) wouldn’t engage in anti competitive practices to shut you down. Many companies had good products but still ultimately failed. I mean hell, the boeing events have shown us the lengths a corporation is willing to go to protect its profits, and that’s just what we heard of.

        Unfortunately capitalism does not allow innovation to flourish like many of us were taught to believe.

    • @filoria@lemmy.ml
      0•11 months ago

      Citing MBFC without supporting evidence is lazy and actively harms discussion in favour of policing “wrongspeak”. I respect it.

    • @Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
      8•11 months ago

      Remember, it was the Chinese labs that also reproduced the room temperature super conductor experiment a few years ago and also found their own material…and then it all turns out to be complete bullshit.

      One patient doesn’t mean anything. It’s great if it’s real (having worked directly with China for engineering, I have zero faith this is even a real thing) but there is a lot of reason to doubt at this point.