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The Long Road to Beta Cells

12-15-2007 · Science News Online

In their quest to cure type 1 diabetes, scientists are finding that turning stem cells into insulin-producing beta cells is a lot harder than it first appeared.

Keywords: road, beta, cells, cell

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Researchers in Belgium have significantly advanced the discovery of a pancreatic progenitor cell with the capacity to generate new insulin-producing beta cells. If the finding made in mice holds for humans, the newfound progenitor cells may represent "an obvious target for therapeutic regeneration of beta cells in diabetes," the researchers report in the Jan. 25 issue of the research journal Cell, a publication of Cell Press.
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