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Abstract
Diabetes mellitus is a worldwide health problem. It constitutes a metabolic disorder that results, among many other causes, from dysfunctional pancreatic islet beta cells with inadequate release of insulin hormone responsible for the control of normal blood glucose level.
Management of diabetes mellitus has been depending on traditional therapies using oral hypoglycaemics as well as subcutaneous injections of porcine insulin variants that resulted in many side effects with subsequent failure of the treatment or its mandatory interruption. During the past decades, recent therapeutic technologies merged under the heading of regenerative medicine. These include update fields like nanomedicine, tissue engineering and stem cell therapy. Researchers have been interested in the study and application of these fields as replacement for the defective insulin producing pancreatic islet beta cells. The initial trials for pancreatic islet transplantation were confronted with major clinical, immunological and ethical obstacles. Tissue engineering has provided implantation of functionally and structurally engineered biological substitutes that repair or replace damaged tissues.
As stem cells are the key to tissue regeneration and repair due to their proliferation and differentiation, cell-to-cell signaling, biomolecule production, therefore attention was directed towards the role of stem cells in regeneration therapy.
Stem cells are obtained from several sources. The most popular sources so far comprise the embryonic stem cells, fetal stem cells and adult mesenchymal stem cells from the bone marrow, adipose tissue and the umbilical cord. These cells are characterized as undifferentiated cells with variable degrees of plasticity, great potentials for proliferation and peculiar tendency for homing. Advantage has been taken from these features for directing the growth and differentiation of stem cells to obtain targeted cell lines by providing the suitable culture media and culture environment.