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MINI REVIEW article
Front. Biomater. Sci.
Sec. Bioinspired and Complex Materials
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbiom.2025.1524518
This article is part of the Research Topic Women in Biomaterials Science 2024 View all articles
Advancing Diabetes Treatment: from Human Beta Cell Technology to Bioartificial Pancreas Development
Provisionally accepted
Joana Sá 1
Simone Sá 1
Hélène Leménager 2 Raquel Costa 1 Brigitte Onteniente 2 Raquel Soares 3 Viviana P Ribeiro 1* Ana L Oliveira 1- 1 Escola Superior de Biotecnologia - Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, Portugal
- 2 Phenocell SAS, Grasse, France
- 3 Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
In 2021, approximately 537 million people worldwide, primarily in low-and middle-income countries, were affected by diabetes, leading to approximately 6.7 million deaths annually or severe secondary complications including life-threatening hyperglycemia. For nearly 50 years, current therapeutic approaches include full pancreas transplantation and isolated pancreatic islets, more recently, cell therapy such as in vitro generated islets and stem cell derived. The transplantation of pancreatic islet cells can be less invasive than full organ transplantation, however, does not achieve the same rate of functional success due to the low survival of the engrafted cells. Tissue-engineered bioartificial pancreas has been designed to address such issues, improving cell engraftment, survival, and immune rejection problems, with the added advantage that the tissue produced in vitro has an unlimited source of material.
Keywords: Diabetes1, cell therapies2, beta cells3, pancreas4, tissue engineering5
Received: 08 Nov 2024; Accepted: 28 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sá, Sá, Leménager, Costa, Onteniente, Soares, Ribeiro and Oliveira. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Viviana P Ribeiro, Escola Superior de Biotecnologia - Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, Portugal
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