Regenerating Cells to Treat Diabetes: A Conversation with Matthias Hebrok
Ever think about your pancreas? Matthias Hebrok, PhD, does. If you’re a biomedical researcher looking to do the world some good, the pancreas is as good an organ to focus on as any. Early anatomists thought the pancreas was just a cushion for the hard-working stomach. Now we know better. The pancreas governs our fuel supply – secreting insulin to help control glucose – and it produces digestive enzymes as well.
Matthias Hebrok
Diabetes already has reached epidemic proportions, and the incidence is still climbing. In people with diabetes, the insulin-secreting endocrine cells of the pancreas either die or function poorly.
Other cells of the pancreas can become cancerous. There are more than 30,000 cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed in the United States each year. Almost all of them are ultimately fatal. Hebrok aims to find a way to regenerate insulin-secreting cells to treat diabetes, and a way to stop pancreatic cancer cells from growing.
But even before Hebrok focused on the pancreas, he wondered early on how a complete human develops from a single egg. Researchers now are learning how genes get switched on and off at just the right time, and how molecules transmit signals from cell to cell to help establish an orderly developmental program.
Many of these genetic switches and signaling molecules are being examined for their roles in causing stem cells to spin off more specialized cells. Some of these genes and molecules are used over and over again in organisms ranging from fruit flies to mice and humans, to give rise to diverse organs and tissues in the gut and throughout the body.
Hebrok is gaining insights into how molecules play a role in forming the pancreas and the specialized cells within this organ. One such molecule is hedgehog, named for the spikes that develop in fruit fly embryos carrying a mutated version of the hedgehog gene. Understanding how to manipulate hedgehog and other molecules – and, in turn, how to use these molecules to direct cell growth and specialization – may be the key to creating a new supply of transplantable cells for the treatment of diabetes.
Another day, we will invite him back to talk about pancreatic cancer. But today, Hebrok, a leading researcher at the UCSF Diabetes Center, will tell us what he has learned about the pancreas and how it develops – and about the possibility of regenerating the hormone-secreting pancreatic cells that are so vital in controlling blood sugar.
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