Efficacy of Stem Cell Application in Diabetes Mellitus: Promising Future Therapy for Diabetes and Its Complications

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a serious and common chronic disease with high morbidity and mortality rates. Recently, stem cell-based therapy has shown considerable promise as a future therapeutic modality for DM. This review aims to summarize the types of stem cells that have the most successful evidence in treating type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), and also to assess the safety and efficacy of different types of stem cells in the treatment of DM. PubMed, MEDLINE, and PubMed Central databases were searched up to October 15, 2020, using medical subject heading (MeSH) terms. After application of inclusion criteria and exclusion criteria, 10 studies were included in our final review: six T1DM studies including 120 patients, and four T2DM studies including 65 patients. Our data showed that autologous and allogeneic stem cell therapy is a relatively safe and effective method for selected individuals with DM. The best therapeutic outcome was achieved by transplantation of bone marrow hemopoietic stem cells (BM-HSCs) for T1DM and bone marrow mononuclear cells (BM-MNCs) along with mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) for T2DM. However, patients with DKA are not a good candidate for stem cell transplantation. Further rigorous experiments are needed in order to be able to establish stem cell-based therapies as the future standard of care for treating DM.