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Type 1 diabetes (t1d) affects every aspect of a person’s life, from what they eat and when they eat, to when they exercise and how they feel physically and emotionally. Because the peak age for being diagnosed with t1d is around 13 or 14 years of age it often hits at a time when a child is already trying to cope with big physical and emotional changes. Add in t1d and you have a difficult time made a lot more challenging.

There are ways to control the disease. Regular blood sugar monitoring and insulin injections can help people manage their condition but those come with their own challenges. Now researchers are taking a variety of different approaches to developing new, innovative ways of helping people with t1d.

One of those companies is Encellin. They are developing a pouch-like device that can be loaded with stem cells and then implanted in the body. The pouch acts like a mini factory, releasing therapies when they are needed.

This work began at UC San Francisco in the lab of Dr. Tejal Desai – with help from CIRM funding – that led to the creation of Encellin. We recently sat down – virtually of course – with Dr. Grace Wei, the co-founder of the company to chat about their work, and their hopes for the future.

She said the decision to target t1d was an easy one:

“Type 1 diabetes is an area of great need. It’s very difficult to manage at any age but particularly in children. It affects what they can eat, what they can do, it’s a big burden on the family and can become challenging to manage when people get older.

“It’s an autoimmune disease so everyone’s disease progression is a bit different. People think it’s just a matter of you having too much blood sugar and not enough insulin, but the problem with medicines like insulin is that they are not dynamic, they don’t respond to the needs of your body as they occur. That means people can over-regulate and give themselves too much insulin for what their body needs and if it happens at night, it can be deadly.

Dr. Wei says stem cell research opens up the possibility of developing dynamic therapies, living medicines that are delivered to you by cells that respond to your dynamic needs. That’s where their pouch, called a cell encapsulation device (CED) comes in.

The pouch is tiny, only about the size of a quarter, and it can be placed just under the skin. Encellin is filling the pouch with glucose-sensitive, insulin producing islet cells, the kind of cells destroyed by t1d. The idea is that the cells can monitor blood flow and, when blood sugar is low, secrete insulin to restore it to a healthy level. 

Another advantage of the pouch is that it may eliminate the need for the patient to take immunosuppressive medications.

“The pouch is really a means to protect both the patient receiving the cells and the cells themselves. Your body tends to not like foreign objects shoved into it and the pouch in one respect protects the cells you are trying to put into the person. But you also want to be able to protect the person, and that means knowing where the cells are and having a means to remove them if you need to. That’s why it’s good to have a pouch that you can put in the body, take it out if you need, and replace if needed.”

Dr. Wei says it’s a little like making tea with a tea bag. When the need arises the pouch can secrete insulin but it does so in a carefully controlled manner.

“These are living cells and they are responsive, it’s not medicine where you can overdose, these cells are by nature self-regulating.”

They have already tested their approach with a variety of different kinds of islets, in a variety of different kinds of model.

“We’ve tested for insulin production, glucose stimulation and insulin response. We have tested them in a number of animal models and those studies are supporting our submission for a first-in-human safety clinical trial.”

Dr. Wei says if this approach works it could be used for other metabolic conditions such as parathyroid disorders. And she says a lot of this might not be possible without the early funding and support from CIRM.

“CIRM had the foresight to invest in groups that are looking ahead and said it would be great to have renewable cells to transplant into the body  (that function properly. We are grateful that groundwork that has been laid and are looking forward to advancing this work.”

And we are looking forward to working with them to help advance that work too.