High-Yield Generation of Glucose-Responsive Pseudoislets From Murine Insulinoma Cells for In Vitro Studies and Longitudinal Monitoring of Graft Survival In Vivo

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Work by Grisell Gonzalez, Chris Li, and other members of Dr. Alice Tomei’s research group in the Diabetes Research institute established a method to generate pancreatic islet-like, three-dimensional clusters (pseudoislets) from cell lines grown in 2D. These pseudoislets can be used in place of primary islets to expedite optimization and screening of in vitro and in vivo procedures. 

 

Pseudoislets offer a cost-effective and ethical alternative to harvesting primary islets. In vitro, they can be used to expedite biomaterial and prototype testing, drug dosing and toxicity studies, and co-culture studies. In vivo, pseudoislets can be used to model islet transplantation. Toward this, we transduced cells to express GFP-luciferase to enable longitudinal in vivo monitoring of implanted pseudoislets using the in vivo imaging system (IVIS).

 

Gonzalez GC, Li CM, Pasolini I, Pete SI, Verheyen C, Vignolo SM, De Toni T, Stock AA, Tomei AA. High-Yield Generation of Glucose-Responsive Pseudoislets From Murine Insulinoma Cells for In Vitro Studies and Longitudinal Monitoring of Graft Survival In Vivo. Cell Transplant. 2025 Jan-Dec;34:9636897251315123. doi: 10.1177/09636897251315123. PMID: 39881520; PMCID: PMC11780636. 

 

Funding for this work was provided by the Diabetes Research Institute Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) grant 1 and 2 R01DK109929 (AAT) and 1F30DK136276 (CML), the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) (grants 5-CDA-2016-171-S-B and 3-SRA-2024-1477-S-B (AT)), the NIH grant 1S10OD023579-01 for the VS120 Slide Scanner housed at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine Analytical Imaging Core Facility, and the NIH National Cancer Institute (NCI) grant P30CA240139 for the CMSR and IVIS system. 

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