Human islet isolation and purification from pediatric-age donors.

THE separation and purification of human islets from the pancreas of pediatric-age donors has been considered difficult if not impossible because of easy fragmentation of the islets and/or their incomplete separation from the enclosing acinar tissue (embedding). I.:! The purpose of this study was to develop a method to separate and purify large numbers of viable human islets from pediatric donors. After preliminary studies on swine islet isolation3 which resemble pediatric human isolation in many ways, a modification of the automated method for adult human islet isolation was developed.