Pancreatic Islets Cell Therapy: Immune protection and Advanced Technology

For type 1 diabetes (T1D) or rate stage of severe type 2 diabetes (T2D), insulin injection is currently the major therapy. Human islet transplantation confers significant improvement in glycemic control and prevents life-threatening severe hypoglycemia in T1D patients. However, the shortage of cadaveric human islets limits the therapeutic opportunities. In addition, chronic immunosuppression, which is required to avoid rejection of transplanted islets are associated with severe complications such as increased risk of cancer and infections. Thus, there is a significant need for novel approaches for large-scale generation of functional human islets that protected by autoimmune rejection to ensure durable graft acceptance without immunosuppression or its complications. An important step in addressing this need is increasing our understanding of transplant immune tolerance mechanisms for both graft rejection and autoimmune rejection. Besides, the idea developing novel biotechnologies to protect transplanted islets should be developed. Generation of functional human pancreatic islets, which can avoid attacks from host immune cells would also provide an alternative safe resource for transplantation therapy. Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) offer a potential limitless supply of cells because of their ability of self-renewal and pluripotency. Therefore studying the immune tolerance induction in hPSCs derived human pancreatic islets will directly contribute towards the goal for functional cure of insulin dependent diabetes. In the past a decades, major advances for scalable generation of functional β cells from human pluripotent stem cells and the idea to protect the transplanted islet were shown.

This Research Topic aims delineate the recent advanced cell therapy in diabetes, covers state-of-arts technologies for immune protection from islets transplantation include stem cell-derived islets. Original Research, Methods, Review, Mini Review, Perspective, and Opinion articles addressing the following topics and other similar studies are welcome:

• Immune protection from allo/auto immune rejection
• MHC matching by Human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSCs) derived islet/ β cells/Organoids
• Advanced biotechnologies, which support transplanted islet survival, reduces immune rejection (Genome Engineering, Biomaterials, Encapsule device)
• Genome Engineering immune modulators in primary islets/ stem cells derived islet/ β cells/Organoids
• Immune suppressants
• Clinical Study/insight for T1D/T2D