Pigs and Seaweed and Islets, Oh My!!!

This evening I was doing a little light reading and stumbled across a link for the documentary "The Human Trial"

2013 Abelcine Documentary Grant - The Human Trial from Vox Pop Films on Vimeo.

This is monumental. Huge. Earth shaking.

I cried.

I felt hope.

I had a crazy challenging conversation with my biochemist son that went kinda like this:

Me: "Hey. This is a really big deal. Do you see that??? It is manageable and it makes sense to me, encapsulating islet cells and plastering them on the liver. Will it work? Why didn't you invent this already??"

Him: "I've been thinking since she was diagnosed that growing cells is just not that hard. Grow the islet cells and reverse the disease. Easy, right? But the trick is in protecting them from whatever nasty thing is in her body that attacks them. You can grow islet cells all day long and keep them alive.... but you can't stop the body from attacking them. It's why you can't cure autoimmune diseases."

Me: "These guys are saying that they are harvesting seaweed to encapsulate the cells to keep that from happening...."

Him: < ten minutes of highly animated scientific jargon, fingers furiously clicking phone for links to scientific journals, exclamations of why this is wonderful, brilliant, should really truly work....ending with a commtitment to check out the journal articles Monday that are published by these research teams>

Me: " so. That good, huh? "

The girl walks in the room.

Her: "What are you looking at? Why is Zach on hyperdrive? Did he cure cancer? "

Us: " Well. There seems to be a human trial coming up in 2014 involving something called an islet sheet. It involves living islet cells encapsulated in a algae polymer that could potentially act as a living pancreas in Type ones...."

Her: "Hmmmm. Is it a patch on the outside? or does it require surgery?"

And the conversation got less exciting and more science-y from there. Life in this house involves a lot of science nerd speak. The allograft is working in diabetic pigs.

Interesting footnote. The girl works at a vet clinic, as her life passion at one point was to become a vet. Our little corner of the world has an unexplained and inordinately high number of dogs and cats developing diabetes. Dogs and cats don't really have unhealthy lifestyle choices...so the assumption is that the mechanism is sympathetic with T1D. Alarming enough that Ohio State Vet school has flagged the situation and is beginning to collect data.
Weird humor. My girl is a genius at calculating insulin dosages for big dogs that come through the clinic.....because they parallel her own. There is a lot to learn here...and potentially more info regarding the environmental triggers that may incite the disease.

Another interesting footnote. The biochemist is all atwitter about the potential applications of the algae based polymer that is being used for encapsulation. He believes it could be a key factor in stopping transplant rejection theoretically.

Yep. That was our Saturday night.

Theoretically? I'm tired. I don't understand half of what gets said in this house, but I smile and nod and ask good questions. But more than that? I feel a tiny crack in the iceberg of "lifetime sentence" and feel a tiny glimmer of hope that needles, tubing, monitors and lancets might simply be words Hannah uses to tell her babies and grandbabies about the few years she had to live with them as part of her daily fight to stay alive.....because they will simply be a thing of the past.

Kind of like me, trying to explain to my kids how I did research before the internet.....