Wounded Soldier's Diabetes is "cured" with Cells

For today I'd like to take a break from sports(believe it or not) and talk about a story that is very close to my heart. In today's Miami Herald, the headline on the front page immediately caught my eye when I saw the word "diabetes." The healine read, "Wounded soldier's diabetes cured with cells." For those of you who don't know, I myself have diabetes which is why I wanted to blog about this story. A 21 year old U.S soldier in Afghanistan named Tre Porfirio was shot in the pancreas. A young man,a service member who might have faced a lifetime of severe diabetes got a chance at better health after a collaboration between military surgeons and experts at the University of Miami. In an apparent medical first, doctors removed a bullet-scarred pancreas from Tre Porfirio, flew the organ from Walter Reed Army Medical Center to the University of Miami, salvaged insulin-producing cells, then flew it back and transplanted the cells into Porfirio's liver. Three weeks after the procedure, an excited surgical team announced that the transplanted cells are producing insulin. Tre Porfirio felt good enough to visit the University of Miami surgeon whose team spent six, pre-dawn hours on Thanksgiving Day isolating the cells from the ravaged pancreas. Dr. Camillo Ricordi, chief of the UM Medical School's Diabetes Research Institute, said "It's an operation we would have done on anyone, but for someone who is putting their life on the line for all of us, I couldn't think of a better way to spend Thanksgiving." Ricordi hopes that this case of transplanting insulin-producing cells will lead to near-permanent cures for people facing diabetes-which Porfirio would have faced without a functioning pancreas. "This could become an unlimited cure available for everyone."