A yo-yo starvation diet that "re-boots" pancreatic cells has been shown to reverse diabetes.

The astonishing result, demonstrated in mice, raises the prospect of treating the condition without drugs that regulate blood sugar or insulin injections.

Members of the US team are now calling for a large government-funded trial to test the approach in humans.

Preliminary findings from a Phase II study of 100 people have already shown that the diet reduces risk factor markers for cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

Scientists conducting the new research triggered the re-growth of insulin-generating pancreatic cells in diabetic mice and reduced symptoms of both the Type-1 and Type-2 forms of the condition.

The Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD) was developed by Professor Valter Longo at the University of Southern California as a way to protect cancer patients from the toxic effects of chemotherapy.

It involves a monthly fasting cycle in which calorie consumption is cut drastically by around two-thirds for five days. The patient then returns to normal levels of food intake for the remaining 25 days.

To maintain a healthy weight, a man needs to consume 2,500 calories per day and a woman 2,000 calories. People on Dr Longo's diet make do with less than 800 calories during the fasting periods.

For the laboratory mice, the diet was adapted by halving their calorie intake on day one and cutting it to just 10% of normal levels on days two to four.

After four days, the mice were allowed to eat as much as they wanted for 10 days to rebuild their body weight.

Two different strains of mice were used to mimic the two kinds of diabetes.

One group had a gene mutation that prevented their bodies responding properly to the blood sugar regulating hormone insulin, a hall mark condition of Type-2 diabetes known as insulin resistance.

The other mice were treated with a chemical that destroyed the insulin-secreting beta cells in the pancreas. This simulated Type-1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease that wipes out beta cells.

Both types of diabetes were reversed by FMD cycles.

Damaged beta cells were replaced with new functional ones, and each group of mice began responding healthily to insulin.

Prof Longo said: "Cycles of fasting-mimicking diet and a normal diet essentially reprogrammed non-insulin producing cells into insulin-producing cells.

"By activating the regeneration of pancreatic cells, we were able to rescue mice from late stage Type-1 and Type-2 diabetes.

"Our conclusion is that by pushing the mice into an extreme state and then bringing them back - by starving them and then feeding them again - the cells in the pancreas are triggered to use some kind of developmental reprogramming that rebuilds the part of the organ that's no longer functioning."

Additional laboratory tests hinted that the treatment might be successful in humans.

Simulating the same approach under laboratory conditions reactivated insulin production in human pancreatic cells taken from patients with Type-1 diabetes.

The researchers, whose findings are reported in the journal Cell, believe the diet may "reboot" pancreatic cells by affecting three genes associated with stress and ageing.

Reducing activity of the genes, known as IGF-1, TOR and PKA, is thought to reprogramme cells to an embryonic-like state, thereby allowing them to restart the process of cellular development from scratch.

"During starvation, the cells go into standby mode," said Prof Longo.

"Then, when you begin re-feeding the mice, you see these embryonic-like cells begin to give rise to beta cells."

He added: "Medically, these findings have the potential to be very important because we've shown, at least in mouse models, that you can use diet to reverse the symptoms of diabetes."

The findings justified a large trial funded by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to see if the FMD approach could be used to tackle diabetes in humans, he said.

Results from the small Phase II trial, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine last week, showed that three cycles of the diet reduced body weight, lowered blood pressure, improved fasting blood sugar control, and decreased levels of the hormone insulin-like growth factor one (IGF-1) which is linked to some cancers.

Since 1996, the number of people diagnosed with diabetes in the UK has risen from 1.4 million to 3.5 million. Of these, more than three million have Type-2 diabetes. An additional one million people may have Type-2 diabetes without knowing it.

Dr Emily Burns, from the charity Diabetes UK, said: "This is potentially very exciting news, but we need to see if the results hold true in humans before we'll know more about what it means for people with diabetes.

"People with Type-1 and Type-2 diabetes would benefit immensely from treatments that can repair or regenerate insulin-producing cells in the pancreas."