MIT News March 30, 2020
To have a living drug factory that you can implant cells in patients, which could secrete drugs as-needed a team of researchers in the US (MIT, Boston Children’s Hospital, Joslin Diabetes Center, UMass Worcester) devised a way to protect the transplanted cells from the immune system by housing them inside a device built out of a silicon-based elastomer (polydimethylsiloxane) and a special porous membrane. The device contains a porous membrane that allows the transplanted cells to obtain nutrients and oxygen from the bloodstream but the pores are small enough so that immune cells such as T cells can’t get in and attack the transplanted cells. They showed that transplanted rat islets inside microdevices maintained normal blood glucose levels in the mice for more than 10 weeks. Human embryonic kidney cells that were engineered to produce erythropoietin survived in mice for at least the 19-week duration of the experiment…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
MIT researchers have devised a way to encapsulate therapeutic cells, such as pancreatic islet cells, to treat diabetes, in a flexible protective device. Image: Felice Franke