Sernova (Biotech company from Canada) to cure T1, T2 Diabetes-Without Ongoing Immunospressants

This is my first thread! I searched ATS to see if anyone besides me posted info about Sernova Cell Therapy, and was unable to find anything. This is a revolutionary process which stands to be an effective, and potentially permanent solution to the plague that is Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes around the world. Statistics from the WHO are as follows:

>Link to WHO factsheet on diabetes:
www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs312/en/index.html

Diabetes
Fact sheet N°312
August 2011

Key facts:

█ 346 million people worldwide have diabetes.

█ In 2004, an estimated 3.4 million people died from consequences of high blood sugar. More than 80% of diabetes deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. WHO projects that diabetes deaths will double between 2005 and 2030. Healthy diet, regular physical activity, maintaining a normal body weight and avoiding tobacco use can prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes.

I have been a sufferer of Type 1 Diabetes since the age of two. I've had many seizures, and trips to the hospital for high blood sugar over the years. I also suffer from a painful condition known as gastroparesis which is inflammation of the vagus nerve, which controls stomach acid release for digestion and other internal functions. I deal with minor circulation problems, and a minor amount of nerve damage from the diabetes. My kidneys are in reasonable condition, as well as my vision still being ok. Throw the mental condition of hyperactivity in there, and it can get to be a very tough deck of cards to manage for having the illness for 28 years.


Below I will post a link to an article by Richard Mills, but before I do that here's a little history on him:

Richard is host of [removed for TOS] and invests in the junior resource sector. His articles have been published on over 200 websites including: Wall Street Journal, SafeHaven, Market Oracle, USAToday, National Post, Stockhouse, Casey Research, 24hgold, Vancouver Sun, SilverBearCafe, 321Gold, Kitco, Gold-Eagle, The Gold/Energy Reports, Calgary Herald and Financial Sense.

Richard Mills has been a type 1 diabetic for many years. His career has consisted of being a stock adviser for many traders in America over the years. Here's his article about Sernova Corp from March 14, 2011:

www.safehaven.com...

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information. The foods you eat are broken down into a simple sugar called glucose. In response to a rise in glucose after eating, your pancreas secretes insulin. Insulin moves the glucose from your blood stream into the cells where it can be utilized for energy. Diabetes is a chronic disease that's caused by the pancreas not producing enough insulin, or when the body cannot effectively use the insulin the pancreas produces.

Diabetes is a condition in which normal blood sugar levels are too high. A Type 1 diabetes diagnosis means your pancreatic beta cells that secrete insulin have been damaged or destroyed - glucose cannot move from the bloodstream into the cells. A Type 2 (insulin resistance) diabetes diagnosis is a far more common verdict for people than Type 1. Insulin resistance happens because of chronically elevated blood sugar and insulin. These elevated levels of sugar and insulin have the effect of "numbing" the cellular processes which moves the sugar from the blood stream to the cells - the body cannot respond to the insulin "requests" to move blood sugar into the cells. Roughly 27% of the people who start out as Type 2 diabetics, will, in the future, require insulin injections similar to Type 1 diabetics.

Complications of Diabetes:

█ Diabetic adults are 2 to 4 times more likely to die from heart disease than adults without diabetes

█ Diabetics are 2 to 4 times more likely to suffer a stroke

█ Diabetes is the leading cause for new blindness in adults 20-74 years of age.

█ Diabetes is the leading cause for kidney failure

█ Approximately 60% to 70% of diabetics have some form of nerve damage Over 60% of non-traumatic lower-limb amputations occur in diabetics

█ Dental disease is more common in diabetics

In 1985, there were an estimated 30 million people with diabetes worldwide. Today there are more than 300 million people with diabetes. Within 20 years it is estimated the number of people with diabetes will reach close to 500 million. An estimated 3.8 million people worldwide died from diabetes related causes in 2007. Global health expenditures to treat and prevent diabetes and its complications total at least US$232 billion in 2007. By 2025, this number will exceed US$302 billion. The Standard of Care for patients with reduced or missing critical hormones or proteins, such as insulin, is often monitoring and injecting these proteins multiple times a day. Today's cell transplant technology (an eight billion dollar a year market) promises to provide a solution to the problem of these biochemical deficiencies and a relief from multiple daily injections but, maintaining the transplanted cell population in the recipient has been the major problem. At this time there is no approved device to house and protect transplanted therapeutic cells in the body. But for people suffering biochemical deficiencies such a device might soon become a reality and for diabetics in particular, the first example of Sernova's Cell Pouch System™, an artificial pancreas - a potential natural insulin pump with the added benefit of fine-tuned glucose control - will be in human trials this year.

Sernova didn't get the trials underway quite as fast as they had anticipated, however the human trials are set to start in 2012, and their target for the completion of the trials is October this year. This implant will be marketed as a medical device, similar on FDA classification as an insulin pump.

Years ago, Dr. James Shapiro successfully transplanted islet cells into humans with type 1 diabetes, however the patients had to take immune-suppressant drugs to keep the corrupted immune system from killing the implanted cells. Unfortunately, immune-suppressant drugs have a whole plethora of nasty side effects, one of them making patients much more prone to getting infectious disease.

The scientific revolution here is that this company discovered how to use cells called Sertoli cells from pigs to stop the immune cells from attacking the pancreas cells. In mammals, it was discovered years ago that the immune system wants to kill the reproductive sperm cells in males. Sertoli cells exist in the testicles, and stop the immune system from destroying the sperm.

What they've done is used a patented membrane with tubes that is inserted to be aligned with the portal vein on the liver. The blood vessels from the portal vein grow into the membrane. After 3 months, the patient goes back to the clinic. Plugs are removed from a piece sealing the membrane, and a mixture of pig islet cells and sertoli cells are injected into the membrane. The patient does have to take immune-suppressant drugs for several weeks, because the sertoli cells and islets can go into shock when they are first implanted. After that, the diabetes is cured, and no more suppressant drugs need to be taken.

Please spread the info far and wide, this could save the lives of 350 million people in the world today.

Here's a link to Sernova's website, which explains the background of their diabetes treatment product. Dr James Shapiro (the Edmonton Diabetes Protocol) is the man at the helm of this project. He's known worldwide for spending his whole career trying to find an effective way to remove diabetes permanently:

www.sernova.com...

If the word spreads about this by November this year, it could help a lot of people like me

This protocol has been tested in diabetic pigs and monkeys. The animals were tested for C-Peptide production, where lack of C-Peptide is a primary indicator of diabetes. The results showed that the animals were producing their own C-Peptide after the cell therapy procedure. They were cured of the illness.

Here is a link to Sernova's site where they talk about how effective the treatment is:

Sernova Cell Pouch Effectiveness

Important findings reported by Sernova include:

☺ Glucose control was achieved using the Cell Pouch System(tm) at the lowest dose of islets transplanted, about 25% of the islets typically used in other international clinical islet transplantation programs. .

☺ Islet transplanted animals were C-peptide positive, a gold standard measure of islet released insulin glucose control.

☺ Presence of insulin in the islets within the Cell Pouch System(tm) was confirmed by insulin staining. Treated diabetic animals maintained good health including stable body weight confirming the effectiveness of the Cell Pouch System(tm) transplant. No adverse events related to the Cell Pouch System(tm) occurred during the study.

reply to post by InFriNiTee


I'ts still a nasty invasive way to cure diabetes..Did you read the article that put patients on 800 calories a day and as the fat disolved from the pancreatic cells they came back to life.It was done under medical supervision.

reply to post by anonentity


I agree that method may work to cure type 2 diabetes in some cases. Weight loss and a low-calorie diet are always recommended for those type of diabetics.

What I suffer from is an autoimmune condition. Type 1 diabetes is a dysfunction where the T-cells in the immune system are corrupted, and they attack the insulin producing cells. To this day, researchers haven't figured out exactly what causes the genetic disorder, but I think the modern toxicity of our environment may play a part in this whole thing.

Because this treatment will be marketed as a medical device (artificial pancreas) it SHOULD make the FDA approval procedure much more streamlined.

Pacemakers and artificial valves are medical devices which have saved millions of lives ever since they were approved.

This implant for diabetics is far less invasive because it is placed just under the skin, while a pacemaker or valve requires open heart surgery.

Here is a link to the PDF from 2010 that was their corporate presentation to potential investors. It contains info about the science, safety and effectiveness of the procedure [Warning: It does show the process for the procedure in photographs, so be warned!]:

www.google.com...

From page 18 (@1920x1080) of the PDF:

Cell Pouch™ Safety

Device fits inconspicuously under the skin

Implantation is minimally invasive; no exposure of deep tissues

No infection or other safety issues post healing of incision site (n>39)

After suffering from the illness for so many years, and seeing that it can increase the risks in other ways to my heath, I will be gladly willing to accept this safe procedure.

If you look on the page 18 photographs, you can see the scar that will be left after healing (the 8 week photo) is approximately the diameter of about 4 pores in the skin. There are 8 places that have to heal over after the procedure is done. After the skin is healed completely, I expect it will leave a row of very small white scars that will eventually fade over the years.

I have had lots of scar tissue from having to inject insulin for my whole life. Over time it does soften up if i don't inject in those sites-so I'm not sure if it's exactly scar-tissue, but it's relatively painful.

Look at the toxic ingredients in insulin. Modern-day fast-acting analog insulins (not derived from animals) are recombinant-dna origin. It says it right on the bottle and in the enclosed micro-print insert included with the drug. They recombine e-coli bacteria to make something which acts like insulin inside the body. One of the ingredients in their "insulin" is hydrochloric acid to "balance the ph." Search Google for toxic ingredients analog insulin and you will get "About 1,010,000 results." You cannot even purchase pork insulin or beef insulin (which is much closer to natural insulin inside your body) any longer in the USA.

My best friend just had an artificial valve placed into his heart. He is 33 years old. He is in excruciating pain now as he heals from open heart surgery. He is still grateful for this device because it saved his life. The one thing he said he hates about it is that he can hear the valve moving inside of his heart. He told me it has made sleeping a lot more difficult.

reply to post by InFriNiTee


While this is great news, the dangers of immune suppression at present outweigh the dangers of managed Diabetes.

My cousin suffered from Leukemia and after many treatments was finally in remission. As part of the treatment her immune system was suppressed.

A woman came on the ward with Measles and somehow, my cousin caught it too. She was dead within a week.

reply to post by chr0naut


The nice thing is you only have to take the immune suppressor drugs for 2-3 weeks. After the blood vessel from the portal vein of the liver grows into the implanted medical device, the sertoli cells protect the implanted islets from being killed (The two cell types are injected together into the patented membrane which is only connected to the blood system). There most definitely is the disadvantage of having to take the immune suppressor drugs for a few weeks. Once the sertoli/islet cells are established and communicating with the blood system, the blood sugar is regulated by the implanted islets. The islets cannot be destroyed because of the protection offered from the sertoli cell discovery.

This is a medical breakthrough for diabetes. I'm sure that if I had the procedure done, I would wear the face masks that I saw people wearing in the stores when the H1N1 scare was going around in 2009. As long as you don't breathe a virus or bacteria in when you're on the suppressors, they won't endanger the patient's health too badly. Then once the patient comes off of the suppressors, they are cured. They no longer have to take the immune suppressors.

reply to post by chr0naut


I'm sorry to hear that about your cousin. I feel that this treatment may be safer since it is a limited amount of time for suppression.

thanks for posting this, Didn't get to read through all of it but i will tomorrow. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when i was 9, i'm 21 now so going 12 years strong with it, hopefully one day there will be a safe cure out there

reply to post by VinnyPNY


Good luck to you! Keep up the fight of maintaining good blood sugars to avoid those complications. As long as I've had it, I was ready for the cure about 10 years ago. Sernova's medical devices have been approved in the past by the US FDA.

Today I found an article which shows the timeline of the clinical trials, and gives a bit of detail on the heart stent that was approved by the FDA (one of Sernova's branch projects). The CEO of Sernova (Dr. Philip Toleikis) has successfully gotten an artificial stent approved by the FDA in the USA with Angiotech Pharmaceuticals. He has 10 years worth of experience with durable medical equipment. Because this company has worked so closely with the FDA in the past, I believe this is the greatest hope that people with diabetes have for getting a cure.

Sernova can be quoted as saying "This will turn the entire diabetes market on it's ear."

seekingalpha.com...

The above article has a detailed history of some of the other projects that Sernova has been involved with, such as creating a fertility monitor for women who have trouble conceiving. The cell pouch technology will be used to help people with other glandular disorders besides diabetes. The reason they are working on the diabetes first is because diabetes is the largest group that they have a working prototype for, and it will be a springboard to developing other medical devices.