Abstract
Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease caused by the lack of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells leading to systemic hyperglycemia. Pancreatic islet transplantation is a valid therapeutic approach to restore insulin loss and to promote adequate glycemic control. Pancreatic islet transplantation in mice is an optimal preclinical model to identify new therapeutic strategies aiming at preventing rejection and optimizing post-transplant immuno-suppressive/-tolerogenic therapies. Islet transplantation in preclinical animal models can be performed in different sites such the kidney capsule, spleen, bone marrow and pancreas. This protocol describes murine islet transplantation under the kidney capsule. This is a widely accepted procedure for research purposes. Stress caused in the animals is minimal and it leads to reliable and reproducible results.
Keywords: Type 1 diabetes, Pancreatic islets, Islet transplantation, Murine model
Background
Many alternative sites for islet implantation have been reported so far in small animal models and the ideal site must be selected according to the technical advantages of the procedure to be used and for the purpose of the experiments. Bearing in mind that the kidney capsule is an extravascular site and it is not immunoprotected, pancreatic islet transplantation under the kidney capsule remains a surgical procedure with low mortality rates leading to hyperglycemia reversion within a few days. In addition, transplantation under the kidney capsule allows histological studies and formal demonstration of islet function (Cantarelli and Piemonti, 2011; Elisa Cantarelli et al., 2013).
Materials and Reagents
Equipment
Software
Procedure
Data analysis
Recipes
Acknowledgments
This protocol has been used by members of our laboratory since it was first published (Battaglia et al., 2006) and it was adapted by Gregori and colleagues (Gregori et al., 2015). The experiments using the mice were performed with approval of and strictly following the guidelines of the Animal Care and Use Committee of the Ospedale San Raffaele and communicated to the Ministry of Health. We would like to thank the members of the group for the support. This protocol is commonly used in our studies of optimizing post-transplant therapeutic strategies in wild-type or transgenic mouse models of type 1 diabetes (Battaglia et al., 2006; Gagliani et al., 2011 and 2015; Fousteri et al., 2015a and 2015b). No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.
References
If you have any questions/comments about this protocol, you are highly recommended to post here. We will invite the authors of this protocol as well as some of its users to address your questions/comments. To make it easier for them to help you, you are encouraged to post your data including images for the troubleshooting.