There’s a guy, Dr. Kieffer,  at UBC who has headed up a number of research projects related to Type 1 Diabetes. This time around he is driving the bus on the culmination of a lot of pointy head work from around the world. He was part of the Edmonton protocol and I met him a few years back on a tour of his facility at UBC. At that time he was showing off mice who’d been living for a year without a pancreas or insulin injections. Yeah, I know, but wait, it gets better.

His current project involves the use of live insulin-producing cells contained in an implantable device dubbed a ‘tea bag’.  It is contained in a semi-permeable membrane (here’s where the pointy head stuff comes in) that allows circulating fluid to bring nutrients inside to the cells and take insulin produced by the cells back out into the blood stream.

The cells are from the patients own stem cells (magic) which is good on so many levels, like no need for nasty broad spectrum immune suppressant drugs. And the tea bag blocks the big autoimmune antibodies that killed the insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas in the first place. Serious magic-happens-here stuff.

AND (yes, there is more) in order to proceed to human testing it is necessary to prove this wee bio-device is safe should a rupture occur. So if these little cells find themselves on the outside of the membrane but still inside the body (hold on, more ‘magic happens here’ stuff) these cells either self-destruct or they have a marker for targeting by hunter cell (I don’t remember which because my brain froze up back at ‘tea bag’)…Either way seriously cool.

This is important on so many levels. Not only does it tick all the boxes in terms of Type 1 diabetes, the marked cell coding has huge treatment implications for cancer, tuberculosis, MS and the rest of the bio-medical bad news alphabet.

You are now free to get some fresh air and perform the happy dance.