DIABETES: CLOSER TO A CURE.

Canadian researchers have found a new way to help the human body produce its own insulin--bringing researchers one step closer to eliminating the need for insulin injections in the treatment of Type 1 diabetes.

In a groundbreaking study, Dr. James Shapiro and his team from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, report that a pancreatic-cell transplant technique was successfully used to free seven diabetic patients from insulin. All needed multiple insulin injections a day before the study.

"My life has totally changed," said Robert Teskey, a Type 1 diabetic who is one of the recipients of the new treatment and no longer requires insulin injections. "Gone is the need to think about how much insulin to take at every meal. Gone is the need to test my blood endlessly. Gone is the need to mentally calculate the nutritional and, particularly, the complex carbohydrate and simple-sugar content of every meal or snack. Most of all, gone is the fear of an incapacitating insulin reaction."

The procedure, now known as the Edmonton protocol, involves injecting pancreas islet cells from organ donors into the liver through the portal vein. The cells settle in the liver and begin producing insulin that controls blood sugar levels. Recipients are prescribed a unique, steroid-free combination of drugs designed to prevent rejection of transplanted islet cells and possibly prevent the autoimmune diabetes from returning.

The success builds on substantial achievements by University of Alberta researchers. Dr. Ray Rajotte, director of the Islet Transplantation Group, carried out the first clinical islet transplants in Canada in 1989.

"This is a dream come true after 28 years of research in islet cell transplantation," says Dr. Rajotte. For more on this exciting research, see the next issue of The Saturday Evening Post and visit the Web site www.immunetolerance.org.