solving the diabetes puzzle that baffled the world

4. Solving the diabetes puzzle that baffled the world
In the fourth of a 10-part series examining some of Canada's most
distinctive achievements, KATHERINE HARDING reports on the Alberta
doctors who designed the biggest breakthrough in diabetes research
since insulin

By KATHERINE HARDING

Wednesday, June 29, 2005 Updated at 4:40 AM EDT

>>From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

Edmonton - Bob Teskey chuckles when he reminisces about his first
visit to the place where the promise of freedom from his "life
sentence" was conceived and born.

"The basement of the university's old medical building -- literally the
bowels -- if you can you believe it," the 59-year-old Edmonton lawyer
said. "I had to climb over heating pipes just to get in and see the
place."

The place is the University of Alberta's cramped, windowless
laboratories, where the now world-renowned Edmonton Protocol was
developed five years ago. A medical breakthrough so historic and
extraordinary that it has been hailed as the most important development
in diabetes research since Canadian doctors introduced insulin to the
world in 1922, a feat that earned them a Nobel Prize.

A team of University of Alberta researchers had solved a medical puzzle
that baffled laboratories worldwide for nearly 30 years -- how to
transplant insulin-producing cells -- known as islets -- into humans
successfully.

Their procedure combines injected transplants with a special cocktail
of anti-rejection drugs.

In research-speak, Mr. Teskey was simply known as Patient 4 in the
first clinical trial of the technique back then when his dramatic
results, along with those of seven other severe Type 1 diabetic
patients, were trumpeted to the planet in the spring of 2000.

For the first time since Mr. Teskey was 13, the Alberta native's body
was forcing itself to make insulin again after he was injected twice
with a liquid he recalled resembled the colour of urine.

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