Researchers in Texas report development of a gel-like material that could help speed the long-awaited arrival of insulin that can be taken in a pill by mouth, rather than with injections. The study is scheduled for the April 14 issue of ACS’ Biomacromolecules, a monthly journal.

Type 2 Diabetes is a chronic disease with rising prevalence rates throughout the world. In Germany, about 8 million people are affected. These numbers could even be an underestimation as a relatively high number of undiagnosed diabetics remains. The newly-published meta analysis 1) on the genetics of type 2 diabetes casts new light on the origin of this disease.

Researchers in Belgium have significantly advanced the discovery of a pancreatic progenitor cell with the capacity to generate new insulin-producing beta cells. If the finding made in mice holds for humans, the newfound progenitor cells may represent “an obvious target for therapeutic regeneration of beta cells in diabetes,” the researchers report in the Jan. 25 issue of the research journal Cell, a publication of Cell Press.

Just as many scientists had given up the search, researchers have discovered that the pancreas does indeed harbor stem cells with the capacity to generate new insulin-producing beta cells.

If the human body were a stage, then proteins would rank among the lead actors in the play we call “Life.”

Steady increases in consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages over the last several decades, as well as rates of Type 2 diabetes mellitus, led nutritional epidemiologists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University and colleagues to explore the relationship between sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and insulin resistance, a precursor to Type 2 diabetes.

Umbilical cord blood may safely preserve insulin production in children newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, according to findings from a small national pilot study presented Monday (June 25) at the American Diabetes Association’s 67th Scientific Sessions in Chicago.

In a fundamental discovery that someday may help cure type 1 diabetes by allowing people to grow their own insulin-producing cells for a damaged or defective pancreas, medical researchers here have reported that they have engineered adult stem cells derived from human umbilical cord blood to produce insulin.

Replacing faulty or missing cells with new insulin-making cells has been the object of diabetes research for the last decade. Past studies in tissue culture have suggested that one type of pancreas cell could be coaxed to transform into insulin-producing islet cells.

Living Cell Technologies Limited (ASX: LCT) today announced it has published evidence outlining the survival and identification of live porcine islet cells and insulin production in a human patient 10 years after receiving a pig islet cell transplant.