title: Clinical islet transplantation.
abstract: Type 1 diabetes affects over 1 million persons in the United States, with over 30,000 new cases diagnosed annually. Transplantation of new insulin-producing b cells, in the form of the whole pancreas or isolated islets, has been shown to ameliorate the disease by eliminating the need for exogenous insulin and normalizing glycosylated hemoglobin levels. Islet transplants are a particularly attractive form of therapy because they are a minimally invasive procedure and are more likely to be scaled-up to treat the large numbers of people affected by diabetes. Currently, only a handful of programs have been successful in the endeavor. Nevertheless, the early clinical experience strongly demonstrates that islet transplantation is an effective treatment strategy in select patients with type 1 diabetes. To scale up this therapy and use it earlier in the disease and for more people, the shortage of suitable donor tissue must be solved and the requirement of lifelong immunosuppression must be minimized.
authors.affiliation: Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Galter Pavilion, #17-200, 675 N. St. Clair Street, Chicago, IL 60611, USA. d-kaufman2@northwestern.edu
authors.forename: Dixon B
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Kaufman
authors.forename: William L
authors.initials: WL
authors.lastname: Lowe
mesh_terms: D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D003922:Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1 / Q000601:surgery*; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D007166:Immunosuppressive Agents / Q000009:adverse effects; D016381:Islets of Langerhans Transplantation / Q000276:immunology*; D014019:Tissue Donors / Q000600:supply & distribution*; D023001:Transplantation Tolerance / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D007166:Immunosuppressive Agents