NEW DELHI: Scientists have for the first time in the lab successfully created insulin from stem cells taken from a child's umbilical cord.

This medical breakthrough, which shows that stem cells taken from the umbilical cord of newborns can be engineered to produce insulin, offers promise to cure Type 1 diabetes in the future.

The researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, who have been working on this project for four years, first grew large numbers of the stem cells and then directed them to resemble the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas that are damaged in diabetes. "This discovery tells us that we have the potential to produce insulin from adult stem cells to help people with diabetes," said Dr Randall Urban. The team announced its finding in the June 2007 issue of the medical journal 'Cell Proliferation'.

Diabetes is a lifelong disease for which there is no cure as yet. Type 1 diabetes is a chronic lifelong disease that occurs when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin to properly control blood sugar levels. Without enough insulin, glucose builds up in the bloodstream instead of going into the cells. The body is unable to use this glucose for energy. Insulin is a hormone that is needed to convert sugar (glucose), starches and other food into energy needed for daily life.

The lead author of the paper, Larry Denner, said that by working with adult stem cells rather than embryonic stem cells, doctors practising regenerative medicine might eventually be able to extract stem cells from an individual's blood, then grow them in the laboratory to large numbers and tweak them so that they are directed to create a needed organ. In this way, he said, physicians might avoid the usual pitfall involved in transplanting cells or organs from other people organ rejection, which requires organ recipients to take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of their lives.

"Huge numbers of stem cells are thought to be required to create new organs. We might remove thousands of donor cells from an individual and grow them in the laboratory into billions of cells. Then, for a person with type 1 diabetes, we will engineer these cells to become islets of Langerhans, the cellular masses that produce the hormone insulin, which allows the body to utilise sugar, synthesise proteins and store neutral fats, or lipids. But we're a long way from that," Denner said.

Diabetes specialist Dr Anoop Misra from Fortis Hospital said, "If this can be successfully carried out in humans, it will herald one of the century's biggest breakthroughs. It is not easy for stem cells to be converted to insulin producing cells. Scientists have earlier tried to convert stem cells into Beta cells but have either failed or succeeded partially. This is the first time that a team has successfully managed the total transformation."