A 25 year-old female patient with type 1 diabetes is producing insulin one year after receiving an injection of islet cells, created from her own cells.

Islet cells created from stem cells isolated from her fat cells, were injected between her skin and abdominal muscles, and engrafted and started producing insulin in months, researchers based at Tianjin First Central Hospital, Nankai University, Tianjin, China found. Just over two months after she received the treatment she was able to stop using insulin, and has continued to independently create insulin for a year after the transplant. The case study is described In Cell.

The patient, who has chosen to remain anonymous but is understood to be based in Tianjin, China told Nature: 'I can eat sugar now… I enjoy eating everything, especially hotpot'.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that results in the destruction of pancreatic islets cells which are necessary to produce insulin. This results in blood glucose becoming too high, which can lead to complications including nerve and vascular damage and low blood sugar caused by lack of glucose control can prove fatal. It is most commonly treated with insulin injections to keep the blood sugar stable. This is challenging even with treatment, however, and the patient in this case study had already received two liver transplants due to complications arising from her diabetes.

Researchers isolated stem cells from the patient's fat tissue and chemically reprogrammed them to form clusters of islet cells, which were then injected into her abdomen, in the hope they would engraft and allow her to create her own insulin. Before the procedure the patient had a blood sugar level in the correct range 43 percent of the time, and this rose to 96 percent, four months after it.

Islet transplants from donors are available but patients must take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their life. It is hoped that using autologous islets cells created from induced pluripotent stem cells, as in this procedure, could prevent an immune response to the transplanted cells. However, the patient in this case study was taking immunosuppressant drugs for two previous liver transplants so it was not possible to assess if these cells' reduced the risk of graft rejection.

It is the first case study published in a peer-reviewed journal of a human with type 1 diabetes, but there are a number of ongoing trials.

'It must still be verified that a woman's cells continue to produce insulin for up to five years before she is considered cured' commented Professor Jay Skyler, an endocrinologist at the University of Miami, Florida who studies type 1 diabetes, in an interview with Nature.

Two further patients had received the treatment since this patient, researchers told Medical News Today. It is unclear whether any other patients had received this treatment before this successful case study.