Beyond islet trasplantation in diabetes cell terapy:from embryonic stem cells to transdifferentation of adult cells

Exogenous insulin is, at the moment, the therapy of choice of diabetes, but does not allowtight regulation of glucose leading to long-term complications. Recently, pancreatic islettransplantation to reconstitute insulin-producing cells, has emerged as an alternativepromising therapeutic approach. Unfortunately, the number of donor islets is too lowcompared with the high number of patients needing a transplantation leading to a searchfor renewable sources of high-quality -cells. This review, summarizes more recentpromising approaches to the generation of new -cells from embryonic stem cells fortransdifferentiation of adult cells, particularly a critical examination of the seminal work byLumelsky et al.