Hirotake Komatsu
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Biomedical Engineering
In type 1 diabetes, the body loses the cells that make insulin. One treatment transplants islets — tiny clusters of insulin-producing cells taken from a donor pancreas — through a catheter, avoiding major surgery.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
- Topics
type 1 diabetes
pancreatic islets
islet transplantation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Build human islet organoids about 5 mm thick by layering parylene microcapillary mesh that carries oxygen from flowing culture medium, testing whether a dynamic culture system keeps the organoid core alive past the usual diffusion limit.
- Redesign the microcapillary mesh so it draws oxygen directly from ambient air, and test whether a static culture system can sustain large human islet organoids without perfusion equipment.
- Compare organoids made from cadaveric donor islets versus stem cell-derived islets as the insulin-producing cell source, measuring survival and insulin output in each oxygenated organoid format.
- Transplant the mesh-integrated organoids under the skin of diabetic immunodeficient animals and test whether blood glucose control improves relative to conventional islet transplantation.
More about the research
The problem is durability: only about one in ten recipients still needs no insulin injections five years later, compared with more than seven in ten after a whole-pancreas transplant. The grant attributes this gap to what islets lose during isolation, namely their blood supply and the surrounding scaffold of support cells and matrix. Rebuilding that supportive setting before transplant is the goal.
Why it matters
Roughly 1.6 million Americans have type 1 diabetes, and islet transplants that could free them from insulin injections usually fail within a few years. A practical way to keep large engineered islet tissues alive and well-oxygenated before transplant could raise the success rate of these grafts, and the same oxygen-delivery mesh could apply to other organoid-based cell therapies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rebecca Craig-Schapiro
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Assess how selective, conditional loss of NKX2-3, a transcription factor that marks islet-specific endothelial cells, in pancreatic blood vessel cells affects islet function.
Minseok Lee
Cornell University, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether holding PD-L1/CTLA-4Ig-expressing engineered mesenchymal stromal cells (immune-calming 'nurse' cells) next to islets in an electrospun device boosts local immune tolerance in mice.
Barak Blum
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Physiology
Test the hypothesis that reducing Robo2 receptors in beta cells, the pancreas's insulin-making cells, is essential for islets of Langerhans to expand successfully when insulin demand rises.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.