Posted by Deb Butterfield on December 05, 1997 at 02:53:52:
In Reply to: Re: Transplant research--What's the current state? posted by Cherie on December 04, 1997 at 07:56:51:
Thank you for mentioning us Cherie. Our approach to posting information about work being done in diabetes research is to relay information rather than to interpret it. We also provide information to help to locate the surgeons, advocates, transplant centers, insurance companies etc. who can give information first hand. At the Insulin-Free World Foundation we are very fortunate to have as our Trustees:
Bernhard Hering, MD - human and xeno islet transplantation
Alberto Hayek, MD - in-vitro adult human islet cell expansion
Camillo Ricordi, MD - human islet transplantation and tolerance
David Sutherland, MD, PhD and Professor Carl Groth, MD - the pioneers of pancreas transplantation
John Najarian, MD - immunologist and of course, one of the first to try to help people with diabetes get kidney transplants.
We are hoping soon to be joined by one of the scientists who is making tremendous headway with cell engineering.
It has been a very busy summer of conferences with the cell conference in Copenhagen, the International Pancreas and Islet Transplant Association conference in Milan, the NIH meeting a few months ago, the meeting in Washington last week and then the one immediately following that in Paris. You can imagine that these conferences are really quite superficial presentations of extremely complex work. I'm afraid that even though I have been to all but the one in Paris, I personally am not qualified to have an opinion on the questions that weigh on our minds like: How long? What will work, what won't won't?
So that gets me back to how we share information. We post the information that is passed on to us by the researchers themselves. Some of the articles published by the participants at the conference in Washington will be available on our site shortly. Before we can put articles on our site we have to obtain copyright permission and in all but a few cases this has been no problem. We welcome articles and information from companies working in the field of diabetes research and in fact, several of these companies have asked to share information.
It is great to have a forum such as this one to share feelings and experiences and I too look forward to Al's feelings about that last meeting in Washington.
Also I have a favor to ask. Most of you already know this, but if there's anyone out there who doesn't yet, we are lobbying for Medicare coverage of pancreas transplants. If you, or anyone you know is a Medicare beneficiary and has been denied a pancreas transplant, please email me at dbutterfield@insulin-free.org. We can help each other out here.