Pancreas
Pancreas islet cell transplants may one day free patients with type 1 diabetes from needing daily insulin injections, thereby minimizing risk for other diabetes complications like blindness, heart disease and renal failure. Although great strides in islet transplant research have relieved some diabetes patients from temporarily needing insulin, researchers need human pancreata to determine how to improve success rates of such transplants. For example, investigators are currently using the islet cells in donated pancreata to see whether donor bone marrow infusions can prevent rejection of transplanted islet cells, and whether islet cells removed from donors after cardiac death (DCD) are equivalent to or even superior to islets removed from donors after brain death.
Other researchers use donated human pancreata to fine-tune our understanding of what causes diabetes. This research hopefully will lead to better treatments for the disease. Each pancreas donated for research can potentially yield enough islet cells to benefit up to 20 researchers.
Islet cells in the pancreas are extremely sensitive to cold ischemic time. Diabetes researchers need pancreata that have experienced cold ischemic time of no longer than eight hours, although some will accept up to 12 hours.
NDRI will place pancreata from donors aged 25 to 65 years. We will accept DCD on a case by case basis. We cannot accept any pancreata from donors who tested positive for hepatitis or HIV. Flush and store pancreata in histidine-tryptophan-ketoglutarate (HTK) solution or in University of Wisconsin (UW) solution.