Alternatives to hESCs

While hESCs is the focus of the Sydney project, Tuch says insulin producing cells should be obtained by any source that is available. That includes the fetal pancreas, an area his group has published on recently.

(Tuch is very keen to ensure that journalists get it right when spelling fetal - the derivation is from the Latin fetare, meaning to bring forth young, and the commonly used 'o' after the 'f' is a mistake. And if The Lancet picked up the error more than 50 years ago, it's probably about time Australian Life Scientist did the same.)

"We have a paper just out in Diabetes which talks about immunogenicity of immature pancreas," he says. "If you take pancreas from therapeutic termination of pregnancy early enough, in the first trimester, and transplant that into a humanised mouse, it won't be rejected. But if you take a later one - in the second trimester - it will.

"My thoughts are that if the immature pancreas doesn't get rejected but the mature pancreas does, could you differentiate the embryonic stem cell, the pancreatic progenitor, up to a certain level and then transplant it without the need for anti-rejection drugs?"

Other areas of exploration are using cord blood and also olfactory ensheathing cells, a project the team is working on with Professor Alan Mackay-Sim from the Eskitits Institute at Griffith University. While this work has not yet been published and he hesitates to say too much, the techniques the team used to produce definitive endoderm and pancreas progenitors in hESCs does not work in cord blood stem cells or olfactory cells.

"There are two interpretations - one is that the technique for one is not the same as for the other, and the other interpretation is that perhaps the pluripotent nature of the embryonic stem cell gives them an advantage over the multipotent nature of cord or olfactory. Which of those it is, I don't know."

And there is the work he has long wanted to pursue but has been hobbled by government - xenotransplantation, upon which there is a moratorium in Australia. He knows the reasons given for the moratorium but still doesn't understand it, but is nonetheless encouraged by recent research addressing one of xeno's problems - the transfer of porcine endogenous retroviruses.

He has not seen the data from Living Cell Technologies, the Auckland company that is trialling transplants of pig islets from its isolated herd, but he imagines there will be enough evidence from that work to perhaps help in overcoming the moratorium in Australia, due to lapse next year.

In the meantime, he will continue to do his research, see his patients and continue his work talking to community groups about science, which he takes very seriously. And he wouldn't mind some assistance from venture capitalists, if there are any out there not currently obsessed with resource stocks. "The basis of all solid research," he says, "is not just the ideas but finding the finances to support them."