Wounded soldier's diabetes is `cured' with cells

A 21-year-old service member who might have faced a lifetime of severe diabetes got a chance at better health after a collaboration between military surgeons and experts at the University of Miami.
BY FRED TASKER AND LESLEY CLARK
Dec. 16. 2009

WASHINGTON -- In an apparent medical first, doctors removed a bullet-scarred pancreas from a wounded serviceman, flew the organ from Walter Reed Army Medical Center to the University of Miami, salvaged insulin-producing cells, then flew it back and transplanted the cells into the man's liver.

Tuesday, three weeks after the procedure, a jubilant surgical team announced that the transplanted cells are producing insulin. And Airman Tre F. Porfirio, 21, of St. Mary's, Ga., felt good enough to meet the University of Miami surgeon whose team spent six, pre-dawn hours on Thanksgiving Day isolating the cells from the ravaged pancreas. the rest