Danish scientists from the Danish Stem Cell Centre (Danstem) at the University of Copenhagen-Denmark believe they have taken an important step forward in the fight against diabetes. The researchers developed an innovative 3D method to grow miniature mouse pancreases from progenitor cells taken from embryos. They hope to apply the technique to grow a miniscule human pancreas within a few years for use in transplanting beta cells to diabetic patients.

Lead Scientist Professor Anne Grapin-Botton says "What we're looking at now is pancreas progenitors in green, as they differentiate and they become beta cells, the cells that are dying in type-1 diabetes patients, and the red cells are the cells that are becoming beta.

The next step is to test the model with human stem cells. "So now we're in mouse we have to move to human, and our dream is to make a small human pancreas in a dish because we study mouse and that's very similar to human development, but there may be small differences," said Grapin-Botton.

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Source: Reuters

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