What are the odds we’ll get this in America in the next 20 years? Or that insurance will cover it? I mean we live in for-profit medical hell. They actually have weight loss drugs that like 7/10ths of Americans need, but a month’s worth cost over $1,000 out of pocket. Insulin is already stupidly overpriced and there’s no financial incentive to cure it, so why would they? The insurance and pharma companies aren’t in the business of helping people. If they were there be non-proffits (for a start). Instead they get as much federal subsidy money as possible and then still charge $1,000 a month that insurance might cover if you’re lucky or rich enough to even have any that’s worth a damn.
So yeah, cool story, but here in America this won’t make any difference. Maybe in 50 years it’ll be affordable, we’ll see.
yeahhhh we’ll see about that
Hm, 5 year old journal, with the editor board, funding and half of the authors all from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but significant hospital contribution. I remain skeptical of the headline but hopeful of the science.
Well if it’s real, it will be a no brainer Nobel prize, so it certainly won’t be the last we hear of it in that case.
strong competition with the teeth regrowing guy
but i think diabetes is more important than missing teeth lol
I mean even though the CAS is a state organization of China, they do still put out real science. they have real researchers working with and for them. I’m honestly more concerned about what they don’t put out than what they do.
For sure, I just get antsy when peer review doesn’t come from from external sources
As you should. I think thats an important part of the process.
And it will be provided for free to anyone who needs it, right? Right?
Only outside USA.
Hey, don’t forget Yemen, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, and Sudan!
A fine group to belong to, we can all agree.
Banned for national security
Free + $46,000 in Ch-China tariffs.
In China, possibly. In the US, not before there is a revolution. In France, not after years in Parliament and seeing 3 to 5 physicians
In Cuba, yes. Capitalist country? Maybe no
Most capitalist countries still have universal heath care…
Are you including the periphery in that statement?
The what?
The periphery. Basic term if you’ve read anything serious on capitalism and how it functions in the world.
Right. So what does it mean?
Countries within the capitalist system which are underdeveloped through violence and coercion in order to be able to extract a higher surplus value extraction to constant capital ratio for capitalists is the gist of it.
Please let me know if there are any terms or concepts I should break down further. (Earnest)
You have to agree to pay a 2000$/year subscription for Life™ after taking this medicine.
So, taxes?
Besides taxes
Certainly not in the US of A… but the rest of the world may have a chance if this actually pans out
Yes included with an unicorn
‘Further studies are needed for validation.’ Understatement of the year
I’m hopeful but wary. Medical science keeps being the one thing left in this world that consistently makes me happy to be alive in modern times. This would be a great breakthrough.
Type 2, since the article doesn’t say.
It’s actually for both types according to the articles in Nature
Yeah but the person “cured” had type 2.
There might be applications for type 1, but that’s speculation.
The articles suggest that it may be beneficial for Type 1, but that’s unconfirmed. The nature of early-stage clinical trials is that people don’t really know how things will work. That’s the point of the trials.
Important to know. Reading on how it works on the article, I wonder if it could be used for type 1, likely in combination with some kind of drug therapy to prevent the body from just killing the new islet cells.
Isn’t type 2 the one that effects massively more people?
Iirc type 2 is acquired diabetes, type 1 is the one you get from birth, so yes.
A lot of people actually don’t get diabetes type 1 when they are born but later in life
It’s adult onset diabetes, just means it didn’t appear during childhood. A lot of people think type 2 is “fat American diet” diabetes but for many of us it’s a genetic condition and typically manifests in the mid 30s regardless of diet. You don’t necessarily become insulin dependent immediately but it’s likely you will progress there
deleted by creator
New trade restrictions coming soon on Chinese pharmaceuticals.
True. How could it be a free market if corporations are not allowed to form a cartel and agree on a price for a product that is literally vital for many people?
Curing diabetes is not in the shareholders’ best interests.
I mean it is… They could literally have a cure that they can sell to millions of people around the world, as well as millions more who will contract diabetes in the future.
I don’t understand this conspiracy and companies don’t want cures. I can understand scepticism around pharmaceutical companies for all the awful shit they’ve done, but it doesn’t mean that scientists and researchers will never be able to produce cures.
I don’t exactly subscribe to the conspiracy but I can understand it as it’s related to “planned obsolescence.” Companies don’t want to sell you a quality product that will last “forever” they want to sell you something that’s just good enough to work for a bit, but will absolutely break or be replaced very soon so you become a repeat customer as opposed to a one time customer.
The same logic applies here with the medication, why would they sell something once even if there were new future customers, if they could instead have everyone on a “subscription” of sorts?
The conspiracy exists because we see it play out in every other facet of our society/economy. Everything is becoming a subscription, you don’t own anything, every product a corporation makes is almost complete garbage, etc… I’m not sure I believe it 100% but I wouldn’t in the slightest bit be surprised to find out that actually was the case.
There is no grand secret conspiracy. Why? The more people involved in a conspiracy, the more likely it will leak out. A conspiracy between two people may never get it, a conspiracy between a hundred people will have someone slip up in a few years at most, but an international conspiracy involving millions of people with disparate interests wouldn’t stay secret for a second.
What we’re seeing isn’t a conspiracy as such. It’s a conversation happening in the open about “business models” and “revenue streams”. It’s also based on customer expectations. There are definitely markets out there for the repairable, buy it for life goods, but there’s just not nearly as big as the customer who upgrades their phone every two years. But obviously that’s going to be different for diabetes. Reliably being able to repair pancreatic cells would be huge. If the companies selling insulin tried to internally stifle research to avoid cannibalizing their insulin business, other companies have an enormous incentive to take a crack at it.
Yeah and there are other parts of the world where researchers search for stuff like this too. If it works it will being fame and money to the inventors and then the drug exists and can ve sold.
Pharma investors have a solid position and are already racking big profits from the continuous model of insulin treatments. A cure would be a detriment to their profits, so it’s not something they’re interested in funding.
No investor nowadays thinks a one-time-payment product is worthwhile. We’re already way past that.
This isn’t to mention that if you were an investor who decided you wanted to go ahainst that, that the other mega corporations (with more funds than most of those 5% individuals) wouldn’t engage in anti competitive practices to shut you down. Many companies had good products but still ultimately failed. I mean hell, the boeing events have shown us the lengths a corporation is willing to go to protect its profits, and that’s just what we heard of.
Unfortunately capitalism does not allow innovation to flourish like many of us were taught to believe.
Does this logic apply in China?
So this is neat. Potentially life changing for some type 2 diabetics, but that depends because some t2 diabetics are not failing to make enough insulin, they’re just no longer sensitive to it at a level that makes it functional for them. I suppose it’s possible that this therapy could cause them to grow enough islet β cells to overcome their lack of sensitivity, but (and I’m a type 1, not a type 2, so maybe my info is incorrect here) that lack of sensitivity can grow with further exposure to insulin making this a stop-gap at best for those cases absent other therapies.
…and with all of that said, being able to regrow islet β cells has never really been the problem for type 1 diabetes. You can regrow all the islet β cells you’d like and it’s not going to cure the underlying immune disease that has caused your immune system to kill off all of your islet β cells to begin with. Unless you can figure out why t1 diabetes causes one’s own immune system to go psycho killer on their islet β cells, you’ve done nothing to “cure” diabetes. Without being able to suppress that impulse for your immune system to murder your own cells, any ability to replace the islet β cells is going to be temporary at best, and probably a waste on the whole.
My brother in law is a “cured” type 1 diabetic, by virtue of his having had a kidney replacement and being on immune suppressing drugs for that. Since they were already replacing the kidney and he was going to have to take immune system suppression medications for that, they also just replaced his pancreas at the same time and the suppression of his immune system has allowed the new pancreas to thrive and continue to make insulin. Easy-peasy. The only trade-off is that he is super immunocompromised and can be killed by common colds, so not a great strategy in general.
big if true
Remember, it was the Chinese labs that also reproduced the room temperature super conductor experiment a few years ago and also found their own material…and then it all turns out to be complete bullshit.
One patient doesn’t mean anything. It’s great if it’s real (having worked directly with China for engineering, I have zero faith this is even a real thing) but there is a lot of reason to doubt at this point.
Removed by mod
Citing MBFC without a supporting claim that discredits the article is lazy and does not benefit the discussion. Comment removed.
Removed by mod
Imagine using dailymail as a reason for why news are factual.
Destroy corporate healthcare by curing diabetes.
presses X to Doubt
Removed by mod
theres a lot of other places reporting on this, and a scientific paper in nature. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-02/breakthrough-in-diabetes-treatment-research/103278156
If this were true, I wouldn’t be finding out about it on Lemmy
Lemmy is a news aggregator. Why wouldn’t you find out about an early-stage clinical trial on Lemmy?
Any such treatment, even if it works, would take decades to pass through the various approval stages before being released to the public.
The headline isn’t ’early stage clinical trial starts the multi-decade process of developing a cure for diabetes’… the headline reads ‘diabetes has been cured’
Alls I’m saying is that if the headline as written were true, we would be hearing it from all news sources at once, not just some single post on a somewhat obscure news aggregator.
To be fair, not much of a demand for such a permanent cure in leading profit driven health care systems where diabetes medicine is gold. How about MSN? https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/world-s-first-diabetes-cure-with-cell-therapy-achieved-in-china/ar-BB1n7cNA
Though one does well to be skeptical yet.
Right? Media and science do not play well together. I can’t count the times I’ve seen amazing new discoveries or cures heralded by the media that never come to fruition because they were only ever just theoretical to begin with or they were never replicated by any other researcher.
Maybe you should be reading Cell Discovery, then
How would reading Cell Discovery increase my chances of hearing about a cure to one of the world’s most pervasive afflictions on some obscure Lemmy post, and more puzzling, how would reading Cell Discovery make it more likely that some wild medical claim with far reaching implications would both be true and also absent from every other news source? What kind of magic does this Cell Discovery have?
That study, which is admittedly a bit above my pay grade, says that more study is needed. It doesn’t say that diabetes has been cured, which is the headline that media outlets have chosen.
My only point was that if diabetes was actually cured, everyone would know about it, not just you and me.
If this were true you wouldn’t hear from this at all.
A permanent cure isn’t something that is wanted by pharma companies. It’s better for them to have something that keeps patients alive and that they need regularly and that is expensive but cheap enough for them to get.
But why wouldn’t a rival company just start up and sell the cures? Not all pharma companies sell insulin.
The bar to entry in the pharma market is extremely high. You need a lot of capital to enter it, which quickly disqualifies 95% of the population.
Now of course, people without money can still get funding from investors. But those investors are already racking big profits from the continuous model of insulin treatments. A cure would be a detriment to their profits, so it’s not something they’re interested in funding. Not all pharma is insulin, but it’s one of the bigger pharma industries.
This isn’t to mention that if you were one of the 5% and managed to have the resources to find and produce a cure, that the other mega corporations (with more funds than most of those 5% individuals) wouldn’t engage in anti competitive practices to shut you down. Many companies had good products but still ultimately failed.
Unfortunately capitalism does not allow innovation to flourish like many of us were taught to believe.
Because then the rival company would also go out of business. The pharma industry is not about absolute cure but about continuously selling things - like all industries do. Medicine that cures you entirely and is not needed afterwards forever again is nothing the pharma industry wants.
Exactly, that’s why we’ll never have a vaccine for something like polio, it’s too profitable to make and sell iron lungs.
You joke, but that’s actually a really interesting story. Jonas Salk, the developer of the first polio vaccine was adamantly against even patenting it and claimed that it ‘belonged to the people’. There is some potential controversy there, but we mostly just think he was a pretty great dude. Dude’s a fucking hero regardless.
I get the analogy you’re trying to make, but maybe want to switch to something else.
I don’t really see how that goes against it. If anything it shows that some people will totally disregard profit in favor of bettering humanity. See also: the patent for insulin.
I get the analogy you’re trying to make, but maybe want to switch to something else.
Like any other vaccine?
Yeah, legitimately could choose just about anything else besides polio and it would have landed pretty well.
We have a vaccine. Not a cure.
Pharma wants that sweet IaaS platform. Insulin-as-a-service.
Eli Lilly and Company wants to know your location.
