Results After Islet Transplantation in Rats

Since the pioneering work of Ballinger and Lacy [1], who demonstrated the successful reversal of diabetes by grafting isolated pancreatic islets, the experimental islet transplantation in rats is now widely established to study problems of tissue transplantation, such as graft preservation, vascularization, and immunological manipulations which allow survival of allogeneic or xenogeneic grafts without continuous immunosuppression, and to search for methods of tolerance development. Even if the ultimate goal of islet transplantation was and is the cure of insulin-dependent diabetics, islet and/or β-cell transplantation has now also been used to investigate basic questions of cell biology in vivo. Among them, regeneration, replication, maturation, and differentiation of highly qualified cells, cell vulnerability in normal and abnormal conditions, and the use of biotechnologically or genetically engineered cells have been studied. Islet transplantation reveals several advantages, including reproducible methods to prepare pancreatic islets [16, 40], dose-dependent induction of experimental diabetes by streptocotozin in immunologically well-characterized rat strains, and the establishment of BB rat lines, which develop insulin-dependent diabetes of an autoimmune nature.