Spider Webs have inspired a New Form of Treatment for Type 1 Diabetes
By Francesca Bizzarri
There are many people who I look up to in my life, but one of my greatest inspirations has always been my mom.
At the age of sixteen, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, a chronic illness in which the body’s pancreas is unable to produce insulin in order to regulate blood sugar levels. With insulin injection being the only available treatment at the time, this meant that she had to inject needles into her stomach around 5–8 times a day. These daily insulin injections are a matter of life and death for people with diabetes. My brothers and I always knew what our mom had to do to treat her diabetes but she never let it hold her back. However, I remember moments when she became frustrated and I would love to see her life made just a little bit easier after all that she’s done for us.
So, when I read that researchers at Cornell University had developed a device, inspired by spider-webs, that could revolutionize the treatment and the management of the disease, you can imagine my excitement!
Before we go into the inner workings of this revolutionary technology, let’s first understand this chronic disease.
What is the main cause of Type 1 Diabetes?
The pancreas plays an essential role in digestion; it produces pancreatic juices called enzymes that break down sugars, fats, and starches.
The pancreas is also responsible for producing hormones, one of those hormones being insulin. Islets are clusters of cells found in the pancreas which work to regulate blood sugar. Certain cell types in these islets are responsible for sensing sugar in the blood and releasing the necessary amount of insulin to maintain normal blood sugar levels.
For people with diabetes, their immune system actually destroys these insulin-making beta cells within islets thus, preventing the body from being able to regulate blood sugar levels.
Without the ability to produce insulin, blood sugar levels in people with diabetes cannot be regulated. When the body doesn’t have enough insulin, glucose ends up accumulating in the bloodstream and can’t get into the body’s cells to be used for energy, which causes life-threatening complication such as heart and blood vessel disease, nerve damage, kidney damage, eye damage, and pregnancy complications. When glucose levels stay at extremely high levels for a long period of time, the patient could go into a diabetic coma as a result of diabetic ketoacidosis.
New treatment on the rise: implanting insulin-producing pancreatic cell clusters
This research group, led by assistant professor Minglin Ma from the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, has devised a life-changing method for implanting hundreds of thousands of pancreatic cell clusters into a patient. In order to avoid the immune system response, the islet cells are coated in tiny hydrogel capsules, hundreds of microns in diameter. The issue that researchers ran into with simply implanting these capsules into the body was that these capsules cannot be taken out of the body easily due to just the sheer number of them and the fact that they are not connected.
The ability to remove the transplant is key because of the potential for tumors forming when using stem cell-derived insulin-producing cells. These cell clusters protected by the hydrogel coating are attached to a polymer thread that can be removed or replaced easily when the cells have outlived their usefulness.
“When they fail or die, they need to come out. You don’t want to put something in the body that you can’t take out, with our method that is not a problem.” — Minglin Ma, reasearch group lead
Looking at how water beads on a spider’s web, Ma, and his team first attempted to connect the islet cell-containing capsules, individually protected by the hydrogel, through some sort of string, but they then realized that it would be better to put the hydrogel layer uniformly around a string instead. This string is an ionized calcium-releasing, nanoporous polymer thread. A thin layer of the islet cells actually contains alginate hydrogel, which adheres to the helix of the polymer thread, similar to dew drops sticking to a spider web. The thread is also twisted and porous, preventing the hydrogel from slipping off as it would on a smooth piece of material
According to Ma, this thread, dubbed TRAFFIC (Thread-Reinforced Alginate Fiber For Islets enCapsulation), is even better than a spider web in terms of connection and efficiency because the hydrogel covers the thread uniformly, limiting gaps. “With a spider’s silk, you still have gaps between the water beads. In our case, gaps would be bad in terms of scar tissue, and the like.”, Ma states.
How is it implanted?
This therapy involves a minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery to implant about six feet of hydrogel coated thread into the peritoneal cavity.
- Two quarter-inch incisions are made
- The abdomen is inflated with carbon dioxide to give the team room to work
- Two ports, one for a scope that is hooked to a camera, another for a grasping device to introduce the implant are put in place.
- The thread is implanted in the peritoneal cavity.
Benefits and Advantages
TRAFFIC has a very large surface area but minimal volume. This promotes better mass transfer and diffusion which is needed because transplanted islet cells solely rely on diffusion to receive oxygen and nutrients. This method is also minimally reactive, protects the islets cells, and still allows them to sense glucose, and since they don’t actually attach to anything, the implant can be easily removed when needed. For people with diabetes, this method would make the disease much more manageable and take the worry out of their daily lives.
Results?
This method was used to treat mice with diabetes and their blood glucose levels returned to normal within two days after the implantation of an inch of the TRAFFIC thread. The levels also remained normal for at least three months after the experiment ended. Retrievability was tested in multiple dogs and there was none or only minimal adhesion of the device to the surrounding tissue upon removal.
Oftentimes, chronic diseases end up taking over a person’s life, but this method shifts control back to the individual. While there is no cure for diabetes, this is truly the next best thing. For my mom, even though she doesn’t let us see her sweat, this implant would help take away the daily stress that comes with having diabetes and make the management of the disease a much more efficient process.
This treatment shows a lot of promise and has a lot of support. The TRAFFIC method has in fact received patent protection with the help of Danish Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, which is the company credited with developing injectable insulin almost 90 years ago.
This technology has the capability to revolutionize the way we approach insulin delivery. It will impact the lives of more than 1.5 million people living with Type 1 Diabetes in North America alone, and the lives of their family members. With insulin prices skyrocketing, advancements in the technology for the treatment of diabetes are essential. In fact, one in four patients in the US says that they’ve skimped on insulin injections, something that they NEED to survive, solely because of the high cost. This technology provides hope for these patients for a long term treatment plan for this chronic condition at a potentially lower cost.
To learn more about other biology-inspired technologies check out my article on mimicking shark skin to prevent bacterial infections here!
If you would like to talk more about Type 1 diabetes or biomimicry technologies reach out to me on LinkedIn here!
