Dolly's Sequel: Colman's latest aim? A cure for diabetes
After you've stunned the world with a scientific breakthrough and ignited a global debate about the nature of life, what do you do for an encore? If you're Dr. Alan Colman, who was part of the Scotland-based research team that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1997, you go halfway across the globe and attempt to pull off another bioengineering feat: finding a cure for diabetes.
Treatment of the disease to date has been pretty low-tech: insulin injections, diet, exercise. Cutting-edge researchers are hoping to change that. Colman's quest builds on the work of a University of Alberta team led by Dr. James Shapiro, who took insulin-producing islet cells from the pancreas of healthy donors and injected them into the livers of Type 1 diabetics. The results were extremely promising. The transplanted cells began producing insulin, and many recipients laid down their needles for the first time in years. To date, roughly 200 Type 1 diabetics in America, Canada and Europe have undergone the procedure. Some 80% went a year without needing to inject insulin. A handful have gone three years; those who did need insulin again required less than before the treatment.
But Shapiro never claimed he had found a cure for diabetes; nor did he downplay the potential side effects of his treatment: patients had to use immunosuppressive drugs so their bodies would accept the new cells, and this made them more susceptible to cancer. His approach could never offer a global cure anyway: you can't harvest enough pancreatic islets from healthy people to supply the entire diabetic population. That problem is being addressed by Colman and his colleagues at Singapore's ES Cell International (ESI), a stem cell research and production company. They want to engineer stem cells in the laboratory that secrete insulin—in short, doing the job that a diabetic's pancreas cannot.
Colman says diabetes has become his "passion," although he's not sure why. (His mother has it, but his interest in the disease preceded her diagnosis last year.) The ambition of the quest is certainly alluring, though—and the number of people who could benefit appeals to both the altruist and the businessman in him. "I'm not here to solve Asia's problems," says the 54-year-old Englishman. "This is a pragmatic move." Dolly was a watershed moment in biotechnology, but Colman's current project has a more specific purpose. To this end, he's relocated to the place he feels is most supportive of his research. Singapore made a billion-dollar effort to attract biotech companies like ESI, partly by placing fewer restrictions on research than in the U.S. and Europe. This is particularly true of stem cell research, the key to Colman's work. In Singapore, scientists can explore this controversial realm with relative freedom, unencumbered by the politicizing and moralizing they might encounter elsewhere.
Colman is hardly the only researcher on a quest to provide relief to Type 1 diabetics. Dr. Norman Wong, at the Uni-versity of Calgary, has had positive early results manipulating intestinal cells to produce insulin. And in Mexico, Dr. Rafael Valdez pushed the envelope further when he implanted pancreatic cells from pigs into Type 1 diabetic children without im-mune-suppressing drugs. "I feel like I'm in a race," says Colman. But it's a marathon, not a sprint. Colman hopes his Singapore team's product will be ready for clinical trials in 2006, though he acknowledges that any advances will likely prove prohibitively expensive for the majority of the world's dia-betics. "Maybe something wonderful will come of it, but I don't know," he says. He also needs to raise funding for diabetes research in a region where other diseases—AIDS, tuberculosis, dengue fever—get far more attention. But he does have one line on his résumé that can only help: "1997: I cloned a sheep."
