Nanotherapy offers ray of hope for the treatment of Type 1 diabetes
Jan 18, 2022
New Delhi, Jan 18 (ANI): A team of researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a technique to help make immunomodulation more effective. The method used nanocarriers to re-engineer the commonly used immunosuppressant rapamycin. Their paper was published in the journal 'Nature Nanotechnology'.The Northwestern team was led by Evan Scott, the Kay Davis Professor and an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Guillermo Ameer, the Daniel Hale Williams Professor of Biomedical Engineering at McCormick and Surgery at Feinberg. Ameer also serves as the director of the Center for Advanced Regenerative Engineering (CARE).The all-Northwestern research team has been working on experiments and publishing studies on islet transplantation for three years, and both Burke and Scott say the work they just published could have been broken into two or three papers. What they've published now, though, they consider a breakthrough and say it could have major implications on the future of diabetes research.Scott has begun the process of patenting the method and collaborating with industrial partners to ultimately move it into the clinical trials stage. Commercialising his work would address the remaining issues that have arisen for new technologies like Vertex's stem-cell derived pancreatic islets for diabetes treatment.
