Cell therapy has provided new hope for patients suffering from diseases where conventional therapy has proven insufficient. At Uppsala University and Uppsala University Hospital, cell therapy has made real progress. For example, world-leading clinical research shows that patients with diabetes type 1 can be transplanted with pancreas cells and regain their insulin production. The group receives large funding from many sources, including a recent grant from the US Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to help establish a new transplantation center, one of only three in the world. The Uppsala-based team is a world-leader in transplanting insulin-producing islets from the pancreas. They have managed to develop a very successful method by combining experimental preclinical studies with rapid clinical studies evaluated by highly-advanced image analysis. This unique constellation consists of researchers at Uppsala Biomedical Center (BMC), the Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University Hospital and the JDRF Center for Islet Transplantation in the Nordic Countries. The new knowledge gained about cell therapy has also proven useful in cancer therapy. Promising data from a collaborative study with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) show that cells harvested from blood or tumors of dogs and enriched or engineered to target tumor cells bring about recovery when returned to the dog.
Read more about immune therapy at Uppsala University Hospital here.

Find more ongoing research projects in Stockholm-Uppsala here.