PHOTOINITIATED CONFORMAL ISLET ENCAPSULATION MATRICES

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Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus affects millions of persons in the U.S. Despite years of intensive research, the effectiveness of current therapeutic regimens remains limited due to the difficulty of duplicating the glycemic control of a healthy pancreas. A potential method of treating this disease is the transplantation of allogeneic or xenogeneic pancreatic islet cells. The most significant obstacle to the development of this approach is the immune rejection of the islets. Immune-isolating islet encapsulation methodologies and materials have been investigated to overcome this obstacle, but their development has been hampered by the stringent technical requirements needed for this application. The proposed project represents a new approach to the technical challenges of islet encapsulation. The proposed technology possesses the potential ability to provide a thin conformal capsule around each individual islet in a facile manner, thereby improving microcapsule fabrication rates, nutrient supply to the islets, and significantly reducing the volume of the graft. A successful demonstration of the proposed technology would have a profound impact on the direction of islet encapsulation research and accelerate the development of the bio-artificial pancreas. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus affects millions of persons in the U.S. The development of a technology that provides glycemic control to diabetic patients without the use of exogenous insulin is of obvious interest to commercial interests and society at large.