People with type 1 or type 2 diabetes who take insulin have a higher risk of developing hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. Now, a study of how a protein works in the pancreas could lead to new treatments for protecting against the potentially life-threatening condition.

Dr. Gina L. C. Yosten, who is an assistant professor of pharmacology and physiology at Saint Louis University in Missouri, and her team discovered the protein, which has the name neuronostatin, in earlier work.

 

They found that neuronostatin could prevent hypoglycemia by getting the pancreas to raise blood sugar in two ways. One way is to make less insulin, which is a hormone that reduces blood sugar, and the other is to produce more glucagon, a hormone that increases blood sugar.

In the more recent investigation, the scientists showed that injecting rats with neuronostatin raised the animals’ blood sugar levels.

They also found that low blood sugar causes human pancreatic tissue to release more neuronostatin and that treatment with glucagon triggers more neuronostatin release.

 

The team says that, with more research, these findings could lead to neuronostatin becoming a target for drugs to prevent and treat hypoglycemia in people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

 

 

 

Scientists print 3D heart using patients tissue.

Because there are too few heart donors, the wait for a life-saving transplant is long.

Scientists are keen to find ways of patching up existing heart tissue to remove or postpone the need for a transplant.

If surgeons could impant a material into the heart, it could form a temporary scaffold to support cells and boost cellular reorganization.

This so-called cardiac tissue engineering has a number of problems; primarily, scientists need to find a type of material that the body would not reject. Researchers have already tried a range of materials and methods, but the perfect candidates are cells from the body of the patient.

 

During recent years, researchers have made some progress toward artificially replicating human tissue.

A group of scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel has taken this work one step further and moved cardiac tissue engineering to the next stage.

The scientists have designed a groundbreaking approach that allows them to create the closest thing to an artificial heart to date.

Their first step was to take a biopsy of fatty tissue from the patient; then, they separated cellular material from noncellular material.

The researchers reprogrammed the cells of the fatty tissue to become pluripotent stem cells, which can develop into the range of cell types necessary to grow a heart.

The noncellular material consists of structural components, such as glycoproteins and collagen; the scientists modified these to turn them into a “bioink.”

Then, they mixed this bioink with the stem cells. The cells differentiated into cardiac or endothelial cells (which line blood vessels), which the scientists could use to create cardiac patches, including blood vessels.