Scientists are closing in on a Type 1 diabetes cure

A team of researchers from Harvard, Missouri, and Georgia Tech has created a new Type 1 diabetes treatment that was proven successful in a large-scale animal model, per a new peer-reviewed study published in Science Advances.

🤿 A deeper dive... Type 1 diabetes is estimated to affect around 1.6 million Americans, a nearly 30% increase since 2017, and cost the economy over $15 billion in medical fees and lost income each year. 

• It can lead to serious health problems like heart disease, kidney damage and vision loss if left untreated, and has no known cure.

🔬 How the treatment works: According to the study’s authors, “Type 1 diabetes develops when the immune system misidentifies the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas as infections and destroys them.”

• This new method, which took two decades to fully develop, involves replacing a patient’s insulin-producing pancreas cells with special donor cells that won’t be misidentified and destroyed.
• The new donor cells are also constructed specifically to ensure they won’t be rejected by the patient’s body. This eliminates the need for long-term immunosuppressive meds that typically come with transplants, which often have severe side effects like high instances of developing cancer.

👀 Looking ahead… The scientists’ method has already been patented and licensed by an early-stage startup called iTolerance, which raised $17 million in March and plans to pursue FDA approval for human testing.