New treatment offers hope for diabetics

They have to inject themselves, often up to five times a day, in their thighs, arms, stomachs or some other fatty part of their body.

But now hopes for an end to the daily jab of insulin are rising for more than 250,000 Britons with diabetes.

Richard Lane, a 61-year-old from Bromley in southeast England, will soon cast off his near-30-year dependence on insulin, which is needed to fight the insidious shortage of the natural hormone that would normally help turn glucose in his blood into energy for his cells. In doing so, he will become the first patient in the UK fully to dispense with artificial insulin.

His treatment stems from a procedure developed in Edmonton, Canada, in the late 1990s by British-born surgeon James Shapiro. The procedure is still very much in its practical infancy: Two patients have tried the treatment in the UK before him, but with only partial success.

Thousands cells have been harvested from the pancreases of dead organ donors and, while he is under sedation and a local anaesthetic, injected through Lane's side into a vein in his liver.

There they have developed their own blood supply and begun producing insulin. The procedure, according to his doctor, Stephanie Amiel, is a "hugely exciting breakthrough. The implications for the future are enormous. Eventually this could mean the end of insulin dependence for all type 1 diabetes sufferers."

Lane had three procedures over four months at King's College hospital, London, each lasting around 45 minutes. The treatment should allow him to loosen the tight regimen of self-blood testing, self injecting and dietary rectitude all patients with type 1 diabetes must follow to stave off the complications, which range from confusion, nausea and loss of consciousness to eye problems, renal failure, amputation and heart disease.

In this type of diabetes, responsible for about a fifth of all diabetes cases, islet cells in the pancreas are destroyed by the body's immune system.

For a quarter of a century, scientists have been attempting to transplant them, but it was not until Shapiro's team cracked some of the problems by sharply increasing the number of transplanted cells and using different types of anti-rejection drugs that progress was made.