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Researchers here demonstrate the ability to efficiently produce islet cells of the pancreas to order from a skin sample. One of the near term goals for the stem cell research community is to develop reliable, low-cost recipes for turning out patient-matched cells of any desired type. This is a necessary starting point for most of the future of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering: lower cost and higher quality cell sources mean faster development and cheaper clinical treatments. There are more than 200 different types of cell in the body, with that number being somewhat fuzzy around the edges and still subject to change. Thus far it has been clear that different cell types require quite different approaches to growth and culturing, so this is clearly a large project, but progress is ongoing:

Researchers have successfully converted human skin cells into fully-functional pancreatic cells. The new cells produced insulin in response to changes in glucose levels, and, when transplanted into mice, the cells protected the animals from developing type 1 diabetes in a mouse model of the disease. The new study also presents significant advancements in cellular reprogramming technology, which will allow scientists to efficiently scale up pancreatic cell production and manufacture trillions of the target cells in a step-wise, controlled manner. "Our results demonstrate for the first time that human adult skin cells can be used to efficiently and rapidly generate functional pancreatic cells that behave similar to human beta cells."

In the study, the scientists first used pharmaceutical and genetic molecules to reprogram skin cells into endoderm progenitor cells - early developmental cells that have already been designated to mature into one of a number of different types of organs. With this method, the cells don't have to be taken all the way back to a pluripotent stem cell state, meaning the scientists can turn them into pancreatic cells faster. The researchers have used a similar procedure previously to create heart, brain, and liver cells. After another four molecules were added, the endoderm cells divided rapidly, allowing more than a trillion-fold expansion. Critically, the cells did not display any evidence of tumor formation, and they maintained their identity as early organ-specific cells. The scientists then progressed these endoderm cells two more steps, first into pancreatic precursor cells, and then into fully-functional pancreatic beta cells. Most importantly, these cells protected mice from developing diabetes in a model of disease, having the critical ability to produce insulin in response to changes in glucose levels.

Link: https://gladstone.org/about-us/press-releases/insulin-producing-pancreatic-cells-created-human-skin-cells