Canada approved the clinic trials of VCTX210 therapy for type 1 diabetes

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Canada approved the clinic trials of VCTX210 therapy for type 1 diabetes

Canada approved the clinic trials of VCTX210 therapy for type 1 diabetes. What are the diabetes treatments?

On November 16, CRISPR Therapeutics and ViaCyte announced that Health Canada has approved the clinical trial application for VCTX210, and it is expected to start patient registration before the end of the year. The phase I clinical trial will evaluate the safety, tolerability and immune evasion of VCTX210 in patients with type 1 diabetes.

CRISPR Therapeutics is a company founded by Emmanuelle Charpentier, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It went public in 2016. ViaCyte was established in 1999 and focuses on the treatment of diabetes and regenerative medicine.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. Because the immune system mistakenly attacks pancreatic β cells, the body cannot maintain normal blood sugar levels because of insufficient insulin secretion. For patients with type 1 diabetes, long-term insulin injections and blood glucose monitoring are necessary treatments. However, daily injections will not only cause great pain to the patient, but also may cause complications such as hypoglycemia, epilepsy and coma, and may even lead to death in severe cases.

Among the many candidate treatment strategies, replacing β cells destroyed by autoimmunity is considered the closest approach to “cure” type 1 diabetes.

The replacement of β cells can be achieved by transplanting the entire pancreas or islets from the donor. However, although pancreatic transplantation has good long-term functional effects, the incidence of perioperative complications is high, and pancreatic islet transplantation has the problems of low implantation rate and reduced graft function.

VCTX210 developed by ViaCyte and CRISPR is a stem cell-derived β-cell replacement product, which has the potential to be applied to all type 1 and type 2 diabetes that require insulin. CyT49 pluripotent stem cells can differentiate into pancreatic endoderm cells, which will be placed in a “pocket”-like device and implanted with the device under the patient’s skin, and blood vessels can enter the “pocket” to directly interact with the implanted cells.

CyT49 pluripotent human stem cell line is designed and modified by CRISPR technology to have immune evasion and can avoid being destroyed by the patient’s immune system. Therefore, this product does not require simultaneous immunosuppression.

In recent years, various innovative therapies and new technologies for diabetes have emerged one after another.

In June 2020, Science Translational Medicine reported a new type of diabetes cell therapy. Researchers used gene editing to modify the patient’s own T cells. The phenotype and cytokine characteristics of the modified T cells are very similar to those of natural Tregs and have powerful Immunosuppressive function.

These modified cells are expected to enter the pancreas after being returned to the patient’s body to help suppress the over-activated immune response and maintain and protect the function of β cells.

This technology has been authorized by GentiBio for development, and GentiBio has received US$157 million in Series A financing in August this year.

In May of this year, Nexturn Bio acquired a 50% stake in RosVivo Therapeutics, and the type 2 diabetes RNA therapy developed by RosVivo also surfaced. RosVivo uses miRNAs with natural anti-diabetic and anti-obesity effects on pancreatic cells, adipocytes and gastrointestinal cells to change gene expression, cell phenotype and function, thereby reversing the pathology of type 2 diabetes.

According to the research report of RosVivo, compared with liraglutide/smeglutide, RSVI-301 has excellent performance and significantly reduced side effects.