# Bioengineering of an Intraabdominal Endocrine Pancreas

**URL:** <https://forum.fudiabetes.org/t/bioengineering-of-an-intraabdominal-endocrine-pancreas/896>\
**Category:** T1 Research\
**Tags:** type-1, isletcells\
**Created:** [May 12, 2017, 1:26am UTC](https://forum.fudiabetes.org/t/bioengineering-of-an-intraabdominal-endocrine-pancreas/896 "2017-05-12T01:26:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![docslotnick](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/forum.fudiabetes.org/docslotnick/32/75_2.png) [@docslotnick](https://forum.fudiabetes.org/u/docslotnick)\
**Post date:** [May 12, 2017, 1:26am UTC](https://forum.fudiabetes.org/t/bioengineering-of-an-intraabdominal-endocrine-pancreas/896/1 "2017-05-12T01:26:11Z")

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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.

> **[Bioengineering of an Intraabdominal Endocrine Pancreas | NEJM](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1613959)**
>
> Correspondence from The New England Journal of Medicine — Bioengineering of an Intraabdominal Endocrine Pancreas

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**Author:** ![Michel](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/forum.fudiabetes.org/michel/32/387_2.png) [@Michel](https://forum.fudiabetes.org/u/Michel)\
**Post date:** [May 12, 2017, 1:51am UTC](https://forum.fudiabetes.org/t/bioengineering-of-an-intraabdominal-endocrine-pancreas/896/2 "2017-05-12T01:51:05Z")

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These are great stories. This is very good progress imho for these reasons:

- islet cells were taken from one single donor (traditional transplants have needed 10x or more from what I understand)

- 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.