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Posted by manveerc 2 days ago

Gene-edited pancreatic cells transplanted into a patient with type 1 diabetes(www.wired.com)
240 points | 63 commentspage 2
wallopinski 1 day ago|
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m3kw9 2 days ago||
Type 2, they need to solve type 2.
toomuchtodo 2 days ago||
If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good for Everything, Should We All Be on Them? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44830685 - August 2025
snarf21 2 days ago|||
There have been a lot of advancements on this front too. One promising technique is duodenum resurfacing (DMR). This helps reset some of the insulin sensitivity issues. The one problem we have is that this is a one time low risk procedure compared to selling insulin or GLP-1. Like all of our problems in healthcare, we have a major misalignment in incentives.
PicassoCTs 2 days ago||
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mezeek 2 days ago|||
isn't that what GLP1s are for (before you get full blown type 2)
javchz 2 days ago|||
Yes, but even lifestyle changes (like a diet low in glycemic load and building muscle) can help reduce many of the harmful effects of type 2 diabetes, even sending it into remission for some people in early stages.

Type 1 is a different story. It’s the lack of natural insulin production (due to a damaged pancreas, autoimmune or other causes), basically the opposite problem to type 2, and no amount of lifestyle changes will replace of need of insulin doses.

kulahan 2 days ago|||
I just want to make clear what the other commenter said: type 2 is completely reversible in its early stages. Lose weight, eat a more healthy diet, and you should see your body return to normal.

Unfortunately, there's a serious time limit on this news, as the disease does permanently damage your cells, but in a way that's not terrible. It's probably easier to be shocked by a diagnosis into a lifestyle change than to find out now and undo 30 years of living with daily insulin injections anyways.

CyberDildonics 2 days ago|||
If you treat sugar as an addiction you can solve it yourself.
moi2388 2 days ago|||
[flagged]
UI_at_80x24 2 days ago|||
I know you put the caveat "mostly" in here but it's important to state that this is not always true.

I was diagnosed with T2 a couple of years ago. During that time I was cycling 25 miles a day. After the diagnoses I completely eliminated all carbs from my diet. My blood sugar was still not under control. My fasting blood sugar (first thing in the morning, and 18hrs of fasting) was the highest point of the day. (14-18 mmol/L) I fasted (water only) for 1 week. no difference.

I was on a bunch of medication, none of it helped.

It wasn't until I started taking a GLP-1 drug that my sugar came under control.

So medication (ozempic) was critical to me getting my blood sugar under control. Diet didn't fix it. Exercise didn't help.

I've lost ~90lbs since then. I'd probably have died/gone into a coma if not for GLP-based drugs.

My anecdote does not contradict wide-spread science and medically derived knowledge. But it should help temper the fat and diet shaming that exists in society.

fhdkweig 2 days ago|||
If you lost 90 lbs, you must have been at least 90 lbs overweight. That isn't a little bit of fat. That is a lot of fat. And it takes a lifetime to put on that much fat. You can't really claim that you had proper exercise and diet before you started taking medications. I have seen many episodes of My 600 LB Life and similar shows where the clients and their caretakers swear on their mother's graves that they even eat at all, but that isn't how reality and physics work.

Don't misunderstand, I'm glad they made the GLP-1 drugs, but still, they have for years been reversing Type 2 diabetes through exercise a diet.

ToucanLoucan 2 days ago||
Calories in/out is the only reliable way (short of surgery or drugs anyway) to reliably change the size of your body in either direction. Genetics, where you are on the planet, hormones, and your average activity levels tweak things but this remains fundamentally true:

If you eat in a calorie deficit, you will lose weight.

If you eat in a calorie surplus, you will gain weight.

It's not hateful, it's math. If you have a hard time getting your intake down due to life circumstances, addictions, stress, whatever, you have my utmost sympathies and I would do anything I could to help, but I'm not going to bullshit you. If you want to weigh less, you must, over a long period of time, take in fewer calories than you burn in a day. That is how you lose weight in the most nuts-and-bolts way there is.

fhdkweig 2 days ago||
I'd also like to point out that people don't think about calories when they eat. They are thinking about their hunger. But for 50 years they've been told "carbs and whole grains are good for you". So they eat carbs which spike the blood sugar followed by spiking of insulin. A few minutes later both crash, which makes them hungry and they go back for more food which is carbs.

It is impossible to not overeat with that mindset. First they have to learn that fatty and fibrous foods will make them feel full all day. My go-to comfort food is ice cream. I was thrilled when I discovered https://rebelcreamery.com/ , which they sell at my local grocery stores. I can eat about 700 calories and a bit of psyllium fiber and be full for the whole day. It is the primary way I lost weight.

dragonwriter 2 days ago||
> But for 50 years they've been told "carbs and whole grains are good for you".

Carbs have replaced fats as the conventional wisdom thing to religiously minimize for a couple of decades now; this is like reading a canned rant that was found in a time capsule from the 1990s.

fhdkweig 2 days ago||
I guess it matters if a person continues learning throughout their life. Some people decide their book learnin is over at high school, and those people will stay forever behind.
somenameforme 2 days ago||||
A bit of a tangent, but the biking stuff is not relevant. What matters is your caloric consumption. Biking 25 miles, depending on your weight, is going to burn something like 1300 calories. For some contrast, a 2L bottle of coke has about 800 calories. So treat yourself to a big serving of Coke after (or during) the biking, maybe a fast food burger or whatever, and it's like you're not even biking at all in terms of caloric effect. This is also true with 'sports drinks' which are also loaded with calories which can be really easy to chug when doing cardio intensive work.

And this can easily happen because biking 25 miles is going to send your appetite skyrocketing. This is why working out to lose weight is probable one of the worst ideas imaginable. Working out is a critical part of staying in good health, but it simply has to be paired with a good diet, permanently. In other words you can't work away a bad diet at the gym (or on a bike), it just doesn't work.

peterfirefly 2 days ago||
Exercise is relevant, too. It's not just obesity and it's not just diet.

(And genes matter, too.)

borroka 2 days ago||||
If you say that diet did not fix it, but then you lost ~90 lbs, which is a massive weight loss [(1) congratulations, 2) we are becoming used to people losing 200 lbs and 90 is a victim of weight-loss inflation], it looks like the problem was that the diet, which can be defined as a particular way of eating and/or caloric restriction, was not really a diet in the second meaning of the term.

Ozempic helped you lose weight primarily by making you stick to a diet, due to its suppressing effects on appetite.

mrguyorama 2 days ago||||
So very rough estimate:

25 miles of biking is somewhere in the world of 400ish Calories.

If you were doing that and not losing weight, you were eating 400ish excess Calories on average.

That's the equivalent of a single packet of Ramen, or about 4 Oreo cookies. Food is extremely energy dense.

Exercise, especially using efficient means like biking or running or walking, just isn't that effective. You need caloric restriction to make any ground for the majority of people.

>But it should help temper the fat and diet shaming that exists in society.

Why would it? Factually, if Ozempic and similar solved your weight issues, it directly means you were eating "too much" food. People who see that as a personal failing will continue to do so, and will see Ozempic as enabling "weak willed" people, or a crutch for "lesser" people.

sampullman 1 day ago||
It doesn't really affect your point, but biking 25 miles is going to burn more than 400 calories. Probably double or triple that, depending on their weight and the workout intensity.
moi2388 1 day ago|||
What fat and diet shaming? If it feels shameful to you that you were at least 90lbs overweight and didn’t manage to follow a diet, that’s on you.

I merely said most incidence of type 2 can be prevented and treated with diet and exercise. Which is completely true.

bregma 2 days ago|||
Most cancer can be prevented and if caught early treated with surgery, chemo, or radiation. No need to look for a cure, those people will probably just keep smoking or eating or exposing themselves to the environment and die anyway.
ch4s3 2 days ago||
> Most cancer can be prevented

This is a highly questionable statement. There are myriad reasons for the kinds of DNA copying errors that cause cancer(s), and few are mono-causal. Type-II diabetes is mainly a lifestyle disease and barely existed 50 years ago. That said any treatment or effort to cure Type-II diabetes is laudable, and it's clear that broad societal factors create the conditions for so many people to develop diabetes.

bregma 2 days ago|||
Your misplaced confidence that Type II diabetes is a lifestyle disease for which you can just judge the victim is questionable.

I have never been overweight, I eat healthy (mostly plants, very little refined carbs), and I am active and run 5k regularly. That didn't prevent me from inheriting T2 from both my parents by the time I turned 60.

I'm pretty certain T2 was widespread 50 years ago. We just didn't test for it and people just lost their feet or went blind or had heart attacks as they got old. Was there even an inexpensive, rapid test for HbA1c in 1975?

ch4s3 2 days ago||
If your read carefully, you'll note that I said largely. There is clearly a genetic component and non-lifestyle environmental factors.

You don't need to go back to the 1970s even. In 1990 fewer than 5% of Americans had Type II diabetes and now that number probably exceeds 15%.

peterfirefly 2 days ago||||
A lot of them are probably not copying errors but errors in which parts of the genome are turned on and which parts are turned off.

(Agree entirely about type 2 diabetes.)

ch4s3 2 days ago||
Sure DNA methylation can also just happen for any number of reasons.
peterfirefly 1 day ago||
I don't methylation is the only mechanism for that.
dpc050505 2 days ago|||
Also a lot of environmental factors that can cause cancer are out of your control if you live in an urban area.
ch4s3 2 days ago||
The cancer rates are relatively comparable in urban vs rural zip coeds in the US[1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38801414/

kingkawn 2 days ago||
Nobody had thought of this wow
bentt 2 days ago||
We were here, at the moment of inspiration
psb 2 days ago|
Just sent this to my son, seems legitimately promising