Shafaqna Health: A team of medical researchers in China has functionally cured a female patient with type 1 diabetes through stem cell injections, according to a study published in *Cell*. The team extracted the patient’s cells, reverted them to a pluripotent state, programmed them to develop into pancreatic islets, and injected them into her abdomen.
Type 1 diabetes occurs when the immune system mistakenly destroys insulin-producing islets in the pancreas, often during adolescence. To counter this, researchers grew replacement islets using the patient’s own cells.
In this groundbreaking procedure, researchers injected 1.5 million lab-grown islets into the abdomen of a 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes. After 2.5 months, she was producing enough insulin to stop her injections. A year later, she continued to produce her own insulin. However, as the patient was already on immunosuppressants due to a previous liver transplant, it remains uncertain if her immune system will replicate the initial attack that caused her diabetes.