Finally! A human pancreatic β cell line

Abstract

For decades, investigators have made numerous attempts to generate human pancreatic β cell lines that could be used to advance β cell biology, facilitate drug discovery, and provide a pathway to β cell replacement therapy for the treatment of diabetes. In this issue of the JCI, Ravassard and colleagues report that this has finally been achieved successfully with a multistep process that led to the generation of cells, which they termed EndoC-βH1 cells, that secreted insulin in response to glucose challenge.

Figure 1. Protocol used by Ravassard and colleagues (1) to generate a human pancreatic β cell line.

To generate the human pancreatic β cell line EndoC-βH1, Ravassard and colleagues transduced fetal pancreatic buds with a lentiviral vector expressing SV40LT driven by the rat insulin promoter (1). When the resulting tissue was transplanted into SCID mice, insulinoma cells developed. These were removed and transduced with lentivirus expressing hTERT. Cells receiving this second transduction with hTERT were then again transplanted into SCID mice. After hypoglycemia developed in the mice, cells were removed and propagated in tissue culture as insulin-containing cells that secreted insulin in response to glucose challenge.