Oct. 3 (UPI) -- Researchers at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine have found rare benign tumors called insulinomas contain a way to regenerate insulin-producing beta cells.
Insulinomas, rare pancreatic tumors that secrete too much insulin, may hold the key to the development of new drugs to treat diabetes, researchers report in a new study that was published today in Nature Communications.
Roughly 30 million people living in the United States have diabetes and nearly 50 to 80 million are living with prediabetes. Diabetes stems from either not having enough beta cells in the pancreas, or beta cells secreting too little insulin, the hormone required to keep blood sugar levels in the normal range
In type 1 diabetes, the immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys beta cells in the pancreas, while type 2 diabetes is caused by a deficiency of functioning beta cells in the pancreas.
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"For the first time, we have a genomic recipe -- an actual wiring diagram in molecular terms that demonstrates how beta cells replicate," Dr. Andrew Stewart, director of the Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine, said in a press release.
For the study, researchers collected 38 human insulinomas and analyzed the genomics and expression patterns of the tumors.
"When you think of tumor genomics, you're thinking of breast cancer or colon cancer, leukemia, et cetera. No one is thinking of doing genomics on tumors that don't really kill people," Stewart said.
"So the real innovation here is that we collected benign tumors that don't metastasize and don't cause great harm, and we're trying to use these benign tumors that have beta cell regeneration going on in them, as the only reasonable source of genomic information on how to make beta cells regenerate."
The development of drugs that could increase the number of healthy beta cells is a priority in diabetes research.
"In this case, we looked at millions of data points collected in rare human insulinomas to try and find an answer to a common disease, diabetes," said Carmen Argmann, associate professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at Icahn.
"We plan to explore clinical applications of these new findings in close collaboration with the team at Sema4, a company specializing in big data analytics for diagnostic development."
