Differentiation of Pancreatic Beta Cells: Dual Acting of Inflammatory Factors

In the past decades, scientists have made outstanding efforts to treat diabetes. However, diabetes treatment is still far from satisfactory due to the complex nature of the disease and the challenges encountered in resolving it. Inflammatory factors are key regulators of the immune system's response to pathological insults, organ neogenesis, rejuvenation of novel cells to replace injured cells and overwhelming disease conditions. Currently, the available treatments for type 1 diabetes include daily insulin injection, pancreatic beta cell or tissue transplantation, and gene therapy. Cell therapy, exploiting differentiation, and reprogramming various types of cells to generate pancreatic insulin-producing cells are novel approaches for the treatment of type 1 diabetes. A better understanding of the inflammatory pathways offers valuable and improved therapeutic options to provide more advanced and better treatments for diabetes. In this review, we investigated different types of inflammatory factors that participate in the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes, their possible dual impacts on the differentiation, reprogramming, and fusion of other stem cell lines into pancreatic insulin-producing beta cells, and the possibility of applying these factors to improve the treatment of this disease.