Prof. Shimon Efrat

Cell Replacement Therapy for Diabetes

Our research focuses on the development of a cell replacement therapy for diabetes, in which the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells are destroyed or malfunction. Our approaches for generation of an abundant source of cells for transplantation include expansion and differentiation in tissue culture of beta cells from human organ donors, as well as differentiation of human stem cells into insulin-producing cells.

Bar-Nur O, Russ HA, Efrat S, Benvenisty N (2011) Epigenetic memory and preferential lineage-specific differentiation in induced pluripotent stem cells derived from human pancreatic islet beta cells. Cell Stem Cell 9:17-23

Russ HA, Sintov E, Anker-Kitai L, Friedman O, Lenz A, Toren G, Farhy C, Pasmanik-Chor M, Oron-Karni V, Ravassard P, Efrat S (2011) Insulin-producing cells generated from dedifferentiated human pancreatic beta cells expanded in vitro. PLoS One 6:e25566

Bar Y, Russ HA, Anker-Kitai L, Knoller S, Efrat S (2012) Redifferentiation of expanded human pancreatic beta-cell-derived cells by inhibition of the NOTCH pathway. J Biol Chem 287:17269-17280

Lenz A, Toren-Haritan G, Efrat S. (2014) Redifferentiation of Adult Human β Cells Expanded In Vitro by Inhibition of the WNT Pathway. PLoS One. 9:e112914

 Nathan G, Kredo-Russo S, Geiger T, Lenz A, Kaspi H, Hornstein E, Efrat S (2015) miR-375 promotes redifferentiation of adult human β cells expanded in vitro. PLoS One 10: e0122108

Sintov E, Nathan G, Knoller S, Pasmanik-Chor M, Russ HA, Efrat S (2015) Inhibition of ZEB1 expression induces redifferentiation of adult human β cells expanded in vitro. Sci Rep 5:13024

Toren-Haritan G, Efrat S (2015) TGFβ pathway inhibition redifferentiates human pancreatic islet β cells expanded in vitro. PLoS One 10: e0139168

Reviews

Russ HA, Efrat S (2011) In-vivo functional assessment of engineered human insulin-producing cells. In Cell Transplantation, Soto-Gutierrez A, Navarro-Alvarez N, Fox IJ (eds.), Methods in Bioengineering, Yarmush ML, Langer RS (eds.), Artech House, pp. 35-46

Russ HA, Efrat S (2011) Development of human insulin-producing cells for cell therapy of diabetes. Ped Endocrinol Rev 9:590-597

Efrat S, Russ HA (2012) Making beta cells from adult tissues. Trends Endocrinol Metab 23:278-285

Efrat S (2013) Recent progress in generation of human surrogate beta cells. Curr Opin Endocrinol Diab Obes 20:259-264

Bar Y, Efrat S (2014) The Notch pathway in beta-cell growth and differentiation. In The Pancreatic Beta Cell, Litwack G (ed.), Vitamins and Hormones vol. 95, Academic Press/Elsevier, pp. 391-405

Grants