Speaker: Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg, Director of the Centre for Pancreatic Diseases at the MUHC and Professor in the departments of Medicine and Surgery in the McGill Faculty of Medicine
Diabetes is the most common chronic disease in Canada, affecting more than 2 million patients across the country. Although type 1 and type 2 diabetes have different mechanisms and causes, both lead to an unregulated level of blood sugar. The side-effects due to this permanent state of unbalance can be severe, such as blindness, kidney failure or cardiac diseases. To this day the only treatment available is injections of insulin: they allow a fairly good regulation of the blood sugar, but the result is still far from the physiological balance. Dr. Rosenberg and his research team are currently working on an innovative therapy that could revolutionize the life of diabetic patients in a near future. It would give them back the ability to grow insulin-producing cells and thus naturally regulate their blood sugar!
This would be made possible by a protein that has the proven ability to trigger this re-growth of insulin-producing cells in both normal and diabetic animals. Dr Rosenberg will lead the first trial to take place in Canada at the end of 2007, as part of a North American clinical trial.