Sem­ma steps to­ward the clin­ic af­ter demon­strat­ing ef­fect of po­ten­tial di­a­betes cure in land­mark an­i­mal stud­ies

The re­search team at the well-fund­ed Sem­ma Ther­a­peu­tics has cleared one of the last re­main­ing hur­dles to get­ting a po­ten­tial cure for di­a­betes in­to hu­man stud­ies. And if they’re right, it marks a ma­jor pre­clin­i­cal mile­stone for a resur­gent re­gen­er­a­tive med­i­cine field fo­cused on a new gen­er­a­tion of stem cell ther­a­pies.

Fe­li­cia Pagli­u­ca, VP of cell bi­ol­o­gy re­search and de­vel­op­ment at the Cam­bridge, MA-based biotech, told the 2019 In­ter­na­tion­al So­ci­ety for Stem Cell Re­search meet­ing in LA Sat­ur­day that their stem cell-de­rived islets per­formed as hoped for — pro­duc­ing in­sulin — in a study in­volv­ing non-hu­man pri­mates whose im­mune sys­tems had been flat­tened to pre­vent a re­jec­tion. In a sep­a­rate study in­volv­ing two pigs, a pack­age of these en­gi­neered islets con­tained in a spe­cial­ly de­signed pack­age were used suc­cess­ful­ly to gen­er­ate in­sulin with­out need­ing an im­muno­sup­pres­sant to pro­tect against a re­ac­tion.

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