[A diabetic supply kit, complete with a knitted pouch that’s shaped like a pancreas. Photo by Erin Stevenson O’Connor via Flickr and Creative Commons.] 

The box arrived around 5:00 pm. Many of Efsun Arda’s colleagues were already heading home for Thanksgiving, but Arda had work to do. As a post-doc in Seung Kim’s lab at Stanford, Arda studies one of the body’s most unknowable vital organs– the pancreas.

Although the pancreas plays a crucial role in diabetes–which impacts almost 1 in 10 Americans, according to the CDC–and although pancreatic cancer is extremely lethal, the pancreas remains largely a mystery, Kim and Arda say.

(A quick Google Scholar search turned up 20,500 papers mentioning the pancreas in 2016 so far, but that’s a stark contrast to the 124,000 papers for “liver” and 113,000 for “kidney”.) 

Much of what doctors do know about the pancreas comes from inference based on physiological and blood chemistry studies.

Collecting pancreas samples from living people is extremely risky and highly impractical. The pancreas itself is a large gland, full of active enzymes, nestled in a tough-to-reach spot behind the stomach. The enzymes inside the pancreas itself are “like a pack of wolves” Kim says; the slightest damage will cause the organ to start digesting itself, which would likely kill the patient.

Consequently, most studies that peek under the pancreas’ hood rely on cadavers.  Continue reading “Inside the Pancreas: How Beta Cells Change as We Age” »