The islets of Langerhans are the regions of the pancreas that contain its endocrine (i.e., hormone-producing) cells. Discovered in 1869 by German pathological anatomist Paul Langerhans, the islets of Langerhans constitute approximately 1% to 2% of the mass of the pancreas. There are about one million islets distributed throughout the pancreas of a healthy adult human. Each is separated from the surrounding pancreatic tissue by a thin fibrous connective tissue capsule. The islets of Langerhans contain beta cells, which secrete insulin, and play a significant role in diabetes.

Islets are widely used for transplantation to restore beta cell function from diabetes, offering an alternative to a complete pancreas transplantation or an artificial pancreas. Because the beta cells in the islets of Langerhans are selectively destroyed by an autoimmune process in type 1 diabetes, islet transplantation is a means of restoring physiological beta cell function in patients with type 1 diabetes.

Human Islets for Research (HIR)® are primary human islets processed from organ donor pancreases that have been approved for research but not for clinical transplantation of either the  pancreas or the isolated islets. HIR® are obtained in a proprietary process of pancreas digestion and islet purification that results in uniformly high quality HIR® for delivery to diabetes  investigators. Quality Control (QC) testing is routinely performed prior to release to assure uniform quality and function of these islets available for research.

Hearing about results from other researchers is always interesting – we’d like to share a testimonial from our first customer using Human Liver Lysosomes. You can get an idea of how these performed in their experiments.

“Our experiments went fantastically well – we see some potential in the material as a tool to generate metabolites of interest in higher yields than the typical systems. See attached a snapshot of one experiment where we incubated a X compound in development with Hepatocytes, Microsomes and the Lysosomes you provided us with. With Lysosomes we were able to generate a metabolite (M6) with significantly higher yields and this is great because it may be a useful tool to allow full characterization of metabolites”

Learn more about Human Liver Lysosomes here: Opening a new era in catabolism models

Interested in learning more about tools like this?
Subscribe to thematic newsletters on your favourite research topics. 

StemBeads^® FGF2 is a revolutionary growth factor supplement that offers a more efficient way to grow FGF2 dependent stem cell cultures.
This supplement delivers a steady release of growth factor into your media of choice creating a more stable environment allowing for:

• Reduction of media changes by 67%
• Better culture quality through reduction of spontaneous differentiation
• No change of culture conditions – use your favourite media

I hear you thinking “Well, that’s just more marketing promises… “. Well, it isn’t, it’s real life!

Just read on and see some of the feedback from researchers…

Continue reading

Today, I’d like to invite you to take a look at a highly efficient and useful kit, which brings together all the required components you need in a complete system for culturing and transfecting human pluripotent stem cells for gene editing.

The PluriQ™ G9™ Gene Editing System includes the G9™ Maintenance Medium and G9™ VTN Recombinant (vitronectin) plate coating for culturing human induced pluripotent (iPS) or embryonic stem (hES) cells in a manner that maximizes transfection by the included EditPro™ Stem Transfection Reagent to transfect genome editing constructs.