• Question: do you have a cure for diabeties

    Asked by jazzy to Susan, Rob, Josh on 18 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      Well, I’m not a biologist or a physiologist, so fortunately it isn’t my job to come up with one!

      This is an area in which stem cell therapy might well help in the future. Diabetes is caused either by the pancreas not working properly, or by your body becoming resistant to insulin. The latter type can often be cured just by losing weight, and certainly it’s generally caused by being overweight (gulp! – I should take more exercise…). But the first type might be curable if we could encourage your body to replace the bits of the pancreas that stop working (the islets of Langerhans). This is the sort of thing that biologists working on stem cells hope to be able to do in the future.

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