Mr. Speaker, medical researchers at the U of A are once again proving why Edmonton will go down in history as the city where medical researchers set the stage for a diabetes cure.
This week Dr. Lorne Tyrell, Dean of Medicine, announced that his research team in co-operation with the Alberta Foundation for Diabetes has developed a technique that will potentially cure type 1 or insulin dependent diabetes.
The team injected insulin-producing cells from donor pancreases into eight patients and put them on a new low dose immune suppressing drug. Before this transplant therapy, these patients needed up to 15 injections a day and lived under the constant threat of blackouts. Now on average they have not needed insulin injections for 11 months.
This breakthrough comes 77 years after U of A biochemist James Collip teamed up with Frederick Banting to develop insulin. Congratulations to the entire team for what is truly a milestone in the history of diabetes research.