On Sept. 26, 2024, a team of scientists in Peking University in Beijing, China announced that a 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body.

The team reported in April that they had successfully transplanted insulin-producing islets into the liver of a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes. The islets were also derived from reprogrammed stem cells taken from the man’s own body, and he has since stopped taking insulin.

Stem cells can be used to grow any tissue in the body and can be cultured indefinitely in the laboratory, which means they potentially offer a limitless source of pancreatic tissue. The study was published in Cell.