Jinwo Park

Different Types of Stem Cells in an efficient treatment of Diabetes

Started Sept. 30, 2022

Abstract or project description

This project identifies the most promising treatment for diabetes using regenerative medicine incorporating stem cells. After examining the factors that cause metabolic disorders the potential of stem cell therapies to cure diabetes using different strategies is compared. The terms “stem cells,” and “diabetes” were used in a search of the PubMed database to identify review articles for this study in the past 10 years, 5 articles caught my eye which they directly related to the treatment of diabetes with the use of stem cells.  

Stem cells can engraft into humans and differentiate into insulin-producing cells to effectively treat diabetes. Smit et l., demonstrated that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are effective when treating diabetes and other metabolic disorders and reviewed how effective dosing and delivery methods are important to achieve successful outcomes. Finally, the paper also compares the treatment options that are currently being used with the new stem cell therapy, noting that while stem cell treatment is more expensive than current treatments such as injected insulin, they are only applied once. Therefore, because stem cell treatment can be curative, it could be more effective and efficient than current treatments such as injected insulin.

Stem cell therapy is an option for the treatment of diabetes because of its safety, effectiveness, and curative potential. While there were many debates at first on whether stem cell treatment was safe and effective, recent research shows that stem cell treatment could treat diabetes by differentiating into insulin-producing cells to potentially cure diabetes.