Cord blood stem cells produce insulin: researchers

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Stem cells taken from the umbilical cords of newborns can be engineered to produce insulin and may someday be used to treat diabetes, U.S. and British researchers reported on Friday.

They said they were able to first grow large numbers of the stem cells and then direct them to resemble the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas that are damaged in diabetes.

"This discovery tells us that we have the potential to produce insulin from adult stem cells to help people with diabetes," said Dr. Randall Urban of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, who directed the study.

"It doesn't prove that we're going to be able to do this in people -- it's just the first step up the rung of the ladder," Urban added in a statement.

Writing in the journal Cell Proliferation, the researchers, who included a team at Britain's University of Newcastle, said they hope to eventually produce an alternative to using controversial embryonic stem cells.

In the United States, Congress has been fighting over whether to increase federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, with opponents saying it is wrong to experiment on human embryos and supporters saying the work is needed to transform many fields of medicine.

REGENERATIVE MEDICINE

Most of the science aims to create a new field of regenerative medicine in which stem cells from a patient's blood are grown and tweaked in the laboratory and used to replace defective or damaged blood or tissue.