Forty million individuals worldwide suffer from type 1 diabetes. This disease is managed by insulin therapy in a vast majority of patients because of the limited accessibility of beta cell replacement therapies.
There is an urgent need for the development of a beta cell replacement therapy that will be available to larger numbers of type 1 diabetic patients.
The VANGUARD project aims to generate a vascularized and immune-protected bioartificial pancreas that can be transplanted into non-immuno-suppressed patients by combining advanced tissue engineering strategies.
This approach will yield a cell therapy in the form of an Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product (ATMP), which can significantly improve treatment of type 1 diabetes.
A new VANGUARD article titled “Clinical Translation and Implementation of a Bioartificial Pancreas Therapy” has been published in Transplant Direct. This publication is openly accessible online at the following link:
In the last months, VANGUARD has explored the support services of Horizon Results Booster (HRB). HRB, an initiative of the European Commission, helps publicly funded projects streamline their innovation processes
Last week, the VANGUARD face-to-face meeting took place in Turin, Italy, at the Molecular Biotechnology Center. The event was kindly hosted by Prof. Follenzi from the University of Eastern Piedmont
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 874700