Review Article Bone Marrow Stem Cell as a Potential Treatment for Diabetes

Copyright © 2013 M. Li and S. Ikehara.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a group of metabolic diseases in which a person has high blood glucose levels resulting from defects in insulin secretion and insulin action. The chronic hyperglycemia damages the eyes, kidneys, nerves, heart, and blood vessels. Curative therapies mainly include diet, insulin, and oral hypoglycemic agents. However, these therapies fail to maintain blood glucose levels in the normal range all the time. Although pancreas or islet-cell transplantation achieves better glucose control, a major obstacle is the shortage of donor organs. Recently, research has focused on stem cells which can be classified into embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and tissue stem cells (TSCs) to generate functiona