Revolutionary advancement for diabetics. Health insurance has just recognized a new therapy: pancreatic islet transplantation. A factor of scientific innovation, this surgical procedure allows patients to avoid insulin injections. The result of fifteen years of research in a public research laboratory on diabetes in Lille, in the North.
“This is the first transplant reimbursed since the lung transplant 20 years ago,” says François Pattou, surgeon and co-founder of the Diabetes Research Institute (EGID). He and his team have been working on this alternative to insulin dependence for fifteen years.
Autoimmune form of the disease
“During this entire period of research, around sixty people have benefited from this transplant in Lille, a few in Strasbourg too, and it works”, explains François Pattou to 20 Minutes. More than three quarters of patients present a viable graft, ten years after the transplant.
As a result, the High Authority for Health (HAS) has decided to democratize the surgical treatment which applies to type 1 diabetics whose autoimmune form of the disease is the most severe. In these people, the cells of the pancreas are destroyed by immune cells, leading to the disappearance of insulin secretion. It is this hormone that controls the decrease in blood sugar levels.
“No more injections needed”
If type 1 represents only 5 to 10% of patients with diabetes, the consequences are often very serious. This disease was, moreover, fatal before the control using insulin injections was possible. “Thanks to this transplant, patients no longer need to perform these injections, the disadvantage of which is their relative effectiveness”, emphasizes François Pattou.
The surgeon therefore assumed that the destroyed cells could be replaced by a transplant. “Islets are very rare cells, hidden within the pancreas. We take a small amount, the equivalent of a thimble, to perform a transplant,” he says. The production of these islets is carried out by the laboratory team of Professor Julie Kerr-Conte, the follow-up of people with diabetes being the responsibility of Professor Marie-Christine Vantyghem. “From now on, we can hope to achieve between 100 and 200 transplants per year, specifies François Pattou. And this therapy must be developed everywhere in France. »
A prize and 60,000 euros in prize money
Professor François Pattou and his team received, on November 21, at the Maison de la Recherche, in Paris, the Line Renaud-Loulou Gasté prize and an endowment of 60,000 euros. This endowment fund rewards major scientific advances in all fields.