FOR the first time, a diabetic patient in Britain has been completely cured by a revolutionary transplant operation.

Richard Lane, 61, has been able to abandon the daily insulin injections he has endured for the past 28 years thanks to transplants of pancreas cells from three donors.

He is the third patient to be treated at King’s College Hospital in London using a technique developed at the University of Alberta in Canada by a Leeds-born specialist, James Shapiro.

The two earlier cases were only partially successful, reducing but not eliminating the need for insulin. But in Mr Lane’s case complete success has been achieved.

“This is hugely exciting,” Stephanie Amiel, a consultant in diabetes at the hospital, said. “The implications for the future are enormous.”

Mr Lane suffered from Type 1 diabetes where the body’s immune system attacks cells in the pancreas, called the islets of Langerhans, that are responsible for making insulin.

For many years, Mr Lane was able to control the disease, leading a successful career as a partner in the accountancy firm BDO Stoy Hayward.

“About four years ago, it began to get out of control,” he said yesterday. “I was put on a 24-hour infusion pump that automatically gave me a dose of insulin every six minutes, with a boost at mealtimes. But that started to fail, too.”

Last autumn he was offered the chance of an islet transplant. Around the world there have been several hundred such procedures, which involve taking islet cells from the pancreas of an organ donor, purifying and preparing them and then infusing them into the patient’s liver in an operation that takes about an hour and is done under local anaesthetic.

The liver is chosen because it is easily accessible through the portal vein and it has been found that islet cells survive there and produce insulin, enabling the liver to serve as a back-up pancreas.

Experience has shown that about a million islet cells are needed, which requires more than one donor pancreas.

In Mr Lane’s case he had three operations, the first two in October last year and the third at the end of January.

He now feels better than he has for years. “I feel absolutely fabulous,” he said. “I have all my energy back and I don’t have to measure out carbohydrates, do six blood tests a day, or take five insulin injections.”

Mr Lane has retired but chairs the board of a hospice near his home in Bromley, South London, and is a non-executive director of three companies, including Biggin Hill airport.

He still takes a single insulin injection at night, to help the islets to bed down, but that is a short-term measure.

Nobody knows if the cure will be permanent and it has its disadvantages, such as having to take immune-suppressive drugs to prevent rejection of the transplanted cells.

Experience around the world shows that 80-90 per cent of successful islet recipients are still off insulin after a year but this falls to about 50 per cent after three years. But results are improving.

“My doctors are fairly confident that they will last for a long time,” Mr Lane said. “If not, I’ll be a candidate for another transplant or maybe stem cells will have proved their value by then.”

Because of the uncertainties, islet transplants are at present offered only to those whose diabetes has become hard to control. A shortage of donors is a limitation.

“We do not have enough donors therefore we cannot extract enough islets to help all Type 1 diabetes patients,” Professor Amiel said. “More research needs to be done to perfect the islet isolation procedures and the drugs we use to prevent rejection of the islets and recurrence of the diabetes.”

One possibility is the use of living donors pioneered last month by Professor Shapiro in an operation in Japan in which part of a woman’s pancreas was transplanted into her daughter.

£10 MILLION A DAY COST OF DISEASE

Insulin controls the absorbtion of glucose from food into the cells. In Type 1 diabetes the absence of insulin prevents this process, leading to a build-up of glucose in the blood. If untreated the condition can produce coma

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