PanINSULA

Project "PanINSULA" data sheet

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 Partnership

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 Project objective

Prevalence of diabetes is increasing among all ages in the European Region, mostly due to increases in overweight and obesity, unhealthy diet and physical inactivity. Today there are about 60 M people with diabetes in the EU, of which Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) accounts for between 5% and 10%. T1D patients must cope with a lifetime of intensive self-care (testing their blood sugar levels several times a day to inject insulin when required) and the risk of premature death. Even with careful management T1D patients can still have difficulties keeping a steady blood glucose level and over time these lifethreatening fluctuations, especially the chronic high blood sugar levels (hyperglycemia), can cause serious complications including heart disease, blindness, kidney failure and amputations due to nerve damage. Currently there is no cure for T1D and no new significant development or permanent therapy for diabetes has emerged in the last 70 years. Islet transplantation while effective is not a scalable therapy and limited to only the most severe T1D patients due to the shortage of cadaveric donor islets. Recent advances in generating insulin producing beta cells from pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), positions stem cell-based therapy as a promising treatment for a wider population of T1D patients. A stem cell based therapy would replace the damaged beta cells in the patients and allow for a natural production and secretion of insulin to regulate the blood glucose levels. To make stem cell therapy a clinically and commercially viable treatment in diabetes, the following technical hurdles need to be addressed: safety (lack of purity), cost-effective scalability, and lack of immune protection of the implanted cells. Pancryos patented technology, in contrast to other available competing technologies, enables both purification and automation ensuring unparalleled safety and cost-efficient scalability and manufacturability of the final cell product PanINSULA.