Report of a successful islet cell transplant into the omentum of a 43 year old woman with a 25 year history of T1 diabetes. Upside is obviously it worked without having to implant the islet cells into the liver. Downside is it still required post operative immunosuppressive therapy.
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These are great stories. This is very good progress imho for these reasons:
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islet cells were taken from one single donor (traditional transplants have needed 10x or more from what I understand)
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the transplant site is the omentum
Imho, the big win there will be when they are able to grow homogeneous (= from the patient herself) islet cells from undifferentiated stem cells (or anything really) – then, no need to collect islet cells on cadavers, and no worry about immuno-suppression.
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