Inducing Local Immune Tolerance to Cure Type 1 Diabetes with Dr. Anthony Japour iTolerance

Dr. Anthony Japour is the Chief Executive Officer and President at iTolerance, an early-stage privately-held regenerative medicine company. Currently, if a patient receives a pancreatic islet transplant to treat type 1 diabetes, there is a need for lifelong immune suppression. The technology that iTolerance is developing leverages the protein Fas Ligand to enable implantation without the need to be immune suppressed to suppress the body from rejecting the foreign tissue. Anthony explains, "Our treatment does allow for local immune tolerance, so around the area of the cells, organoid, or tissue. It allows it to be accepted without the body rejecting it by inducing what's called local immune tolerance. This does not affect the systemic immune system, only the local immune system. And it has not been done in humans yet. It's been tested both in rodent model rats as well as in monkeys. And in both models, we can cure type 1 diabetes." "The technology of our product came from Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, as well as the University of Louisville in Kentucky. And the researcher that was there is now at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. This is Dr. Andrés García at Georgia Tech, who is a world-renowned expert in biomaterials. He's been developing the micro gel treatment for a period of time and is a very well-respected researcher. Also, Dr. Haval Shirwan, who is an immunologist, has been working with the FasL protein for roughly 20 or 25 years." @iTolerance_Inc #RegenerativeMedicine #Transplants #PancreaticIsletTransplant #Diabetes #Type1Diabetes  #ImmuneSuppressiveDrugs #ImmuneTolerance #Apoptosis #FasL #FasLigand iTolerance.com Download the transcript here