Pancreatic Cell Transplant Study for Diabetics

July 13 -- At the meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People today, President Clinton announced the beginning of a major multi-nation effort to test if a new pancreatic cell transplant method will help diabetics live without insulin.

Clinton chose to publicize the trial at the NAACP meeting to bring attention to the fact that African-Americans are almost two times as likely as whites to have diabetes and because the federal government is helping to support the trial.

Follows Previous Study

The National Institutes of Health and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation will be releasing $5 million to help support the testing of the new experimental method at 10 centers worldwide. Doctors expect to begin what is to be called the Edmonton Protocol trial in the fall, with centers located in Edmonton (Canada), Miami, Minneapolis, Boston, St. Louis, Seattle and Bethesda. European sites are also planned in Geneva, Switzerland; Giessen, Germany; and Milan, Italy.

The massive undertaking represents a follow-up to the June 6 publication in the New England Journal of Medicine of a study of eight patients with severe diabetes who no longer needed insulin injections and remained diabetes-free for as long as 15 months — and counting — after pancreatic islet cell transplants. Islet cells are the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.

The research was carried out by Dr. James Shapiro, director of the islet transplant program at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton.

Not A Cure

The study represented the first time diabetics had been kept off insulin for more than a year, although doctors have been experimenting with islet cell transplantation for years. Researchers attribute part of the Edmonton success to a different regimen of immunosuppressive drugs after surgery. Instead of using cyclosporine and steroids, which researchers believe damage islet cells, the doctors used three other anti-rejection drugs.

While this new research offers hope, doctors caution it is not a cure that’s ready for all diabetics, because all the patients will have to take a regimen of immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives.