| Popis: |
Type 1 type Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) occurs when insulin producing beta cells located in pancreatic Islets of Langerhans undergo immune destruction. Patients suffering from this condition are hyperglycemic and have to be administered daily doses of insulin injections and need to undergo frequent blood glucose testing. Transplantation of islet cells is found to improve the health condition of patients suffering from T1DM and there are success stories where patients have achieved complete insulin-independence. The degree of glycemic control provided by successful islet transplant is found to be superior to any other form of exogenous insulin treatments available currently. Considerable progress has been made in clinical islet transplantation procedures over past 10 years. The introduction of the computer based method for islet isolation in the late 1980’s contributed to the feasibility of large-scale islet isolation for clinical transplantation. The ongoing research at University of Cincinnati attempts to cure diabetes by developing standardized methods to isolate and purify islet cells. This thesis is concerned with the development of a perfusion system that facilitates to monitor and record data during administering collagenase intraductally in the organ to liberate the islets cells. Another main goal of the research was also to standardize the imaging of the cells to acquire images at various magnifications and archive them for post isolation analysis.Finally a large pool of process and physiological data obtained during the pancreatic isolations along with the post and pre-transplant metabolic data has been analyzed to determine the parameters affecting the Islet yield. |
