I was surfing the net other day for some other material and stumbled across an article at www.stuff.co.nz giving an update on the status of the first patient taking place in the pig cell transplant at Middlemore Hospital that took place recently.

They have only given the treatment to one person thus far but it is interesting to hear that the initial results are sounding positive. It is early days but the patient, a 48 year old who has had type one diabetes for 20 years hasn’t reported any negative effects of the treatment in October and has seen a 30% reduction in overall insulin dose which is pretty cool. They’ve got another 7 people that have been signed up who are going to start receiving the treatments in 2010 so it will be fascinating to see how it all progresses – I imagine that they treated one person first to make sure that nothing went awry before proceeding with the remaining volunteers?

I also found it really interesting to and read all the comments at the bottom and try and gauge what the general public thinks. The only people that are likely to care enough to comment are mostly diabetics but here are a couple I reckon were particularly interesting:

“… Its great to see initiatives for type 1 diabetics, there are so many trials out there for type 2s, but you hardly ever hear of any for type 1s”.

“They have already found a total cure for diabetes. Gastric by-pass surgery has the side effect of stopping diabetes 100%” (this guy got shot down pretty quick!)

I’ll keep my ear to the ground guys and let you know what I find.

Full article can be found, read and commented on here.

- Aaron