Diabetes and ‘bloody’ islets Seminar

Islet transplantation is a current treatment and known cure for Type 1 Diabetes. A confounding factor for this therapy is the loss of islet function during the early post-transplantation period because of deleterious responses of the avascular transplanted islets to a hypoxic environment. This has detrimental effects on the outcome of individual grafts, while the clinical response of administering multiple grafts to achieve normoglycaemia exacerbates the scarcity of donor tissue. Enhancing the rate at which islet grafts establish an adequate blood supply should improve the immediate function of the graft material and is central to our studies.