Manufacturing Novel Stem Cell Products To Treat Type 1 Diabetes

The ISLET project, a multi-center collaboration of leading European researchers, aims to develop a manufacturing pipeline for stem cell-based products to treat patients with Type 1 Diabetes. In Type 1 Diabetes a patient’s immune system destroys the beta cells within the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas making a patient depend-ent on life-long delivery of insulin. Based on in-house methods, ISLET aims to deliver a product composed of clusters of insulin-producing beta cells, derived from human pluripotent stem cells, ready to be used in phase 1 clinical trials.

ISLET also aims to advance this product by engineering clusters of hormone-producing cells that not only consist of the insulin-producing beta cells but also other hormone-producing islet cells, thereby engineering a product that is more alike the islets of Langerhans that are found in the pancreas.

Finally, ISLET researchers have the goal of developing innovative solutions to a common bottleneck in stem cell therapy, namely, how to predict the therapeutic capacity of stem cell products.

With hubs at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Helmholtz Diabetes Center, Munich, Germany, the European team of world-leading and complementary expertise such as the lipidomics knowledge, has been carefully hand-picked to move the work smoothly from the lab bench to the clinic and to market the new products.

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