Another World First: Chinese Doctors Successfully "Cure" Diabetes!
- Elva Chen
- Dec 10, 2025
- 6 min read
With a history of two liver transplants, 11 years of type 1 diabetes, and a pancreas transplant in 2017 that had to be removed due to thrombosis, the survival of this 25-year-old female patient was uncertain—until she tried the cutting-edge stem cell regeneration therapy at Tianjin First Central Hospital.
On September 25, the research team led by Shen Zhongyang and Wang Shusen from Tianjin First Central Hospital, together with Deng Hongkui's team from Peking University/Changping Laboratory, published a landmark paper in the top journal Cell. For the first time globally, they achieved clinical functional cure of type 1 diabetes through innovative stem cell-derived islet transplantation. The patient no longer required exogenous insulin therapy during the 1-year follow-up period.
Type 1 diabetes typically affects children and adolescents. Without effective control, patients may develop severe complications, even endangering life. Over decades, islet transplantation has achieved good clinical results in treating diabetes, but the shortage of human pancreatic donors has severely limited its widespread application.
Regenerative islet transplantation derived from the patient's own cells is expected to completely solve this problem.
Breaking Free from Insulin: Achieving Functional Cure!
Statistics show that there are 1 million type 1 diabetes patients in China. They cannot be cured and can only rely on lifelong insulin injections, hypoglycemic drugs, etc., to control blood glucose and maintain life. However, precise blood glucose regulation remains a challenge, and the risk of diabetes complications—including unpreventable microvascular, macrovascular, and neurological lesions—persists long-term.
For the patient enrolled in this trial, the situation was far more severe.
According to researchers, the 25-year-old female patient had a history of cryptogenic cirrhosis and underwent two liver transplants in 2014 and 2016. She was also diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2012. Due to poor long-term blood glucose control, one year after the liver transplant in 2017, doctors performed a total pancreas transplant for her.
Pancreas and islet transplantation are treatment options for type 1 diabetes, but they are not perfect solutions. Constrained by issues such as the need for long-term immunosuppressants and donor scarcity, this treatment strategy is limited to the most severe cases.
In fact, one year after the total pancreas transplant, the patient developed severe thrombotic complications, forcing doctors to remove the pancreatic graft. Before arriving at Tianjin First Central Hospital, her plasma C-peptide level (a marker of islet cell function) was below the detection limit, and her glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) was above the normal range.
Despite multiple rounds of intensive hypoglycemic therapy, her blood glucose control remained suboptimal with large fluctuations, and she experienced severe hypoglycemic episodes. In the past year, she had 3 severe hypoglycemic events.
Initially, the patient was only eligible for another islet transplant, but doctors' evaluations revealed positive results for relevant antigen tests—indicating a high risk of severe rejection and failure with allogeneic transplantation. After a multidisciplinary discussion involving the Endocrinology Department and Transplantation Center, and with the patient's informed consent, doctors decided to perform a novel autologous stem cell-derived islet transplantation.
The principle of this transplantation lies in the unlimited proliferation ability of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), which can differentiate into all functional cell types of the organism. Professor Deng Hongkui, the developer of this technology, had just won the Future Science Prize (known as China's "Nobel Prize") in August this year for his outstanding achievements in "creating chemically induced pluripotent stem cells (CiPSCs) and transforming cell fate and state."
On June 25, 2023, under ultrasound guidance, the research team injected islets differentiated from CiPSCs into the patient's body. Meanwhile, to prevent autoimmune attacks on the new islets, doctors administered pre-emptive induction therapy to avoid rejection.
Within two weeks after the transplant, the patient's daily insulin dosage began to decrease. From day 18 postoperatively, the downward trend stabilized, and by day 75, she was completely free from insulin—with the therapeutic effect remaining stable for over 1 year. Simultaneously, her fasting blood glucose continued to decrease and remained within the normal range long-term.
In the "glucose tolerance test," doctors observed her condition before and after glucose injection. Preoperatively, her blood glucose soared within 3 hours of glucose injection, indicating complete destruction of her pancreatic islet β-cell function. Post-transplant, even after glucose injection, her blood glucose remained stable.
Notably, this treatment also adopted a novel islet transplantation strategy—"subcutaneous transplantation under the anterior rectus sheath." Compared with the traditional portal vein injection transplantation, this approach is less invasive, easier to operate, and enables better long-term survival and functional maintenance of transplanted islet cells.
"The results confirm the feasibility of further clinical research on CiPSC-derived islet transplantation for type 1 diabetes," the researchers stated. It is understood that a total of 3 patients have participated in this trial, with the other two having completed treatment and data still being collated and analyzed.
Stem Cells: A New Hope for Diabetes Treatment?
This research achievement did not happen overnight. Although the treatment protocol is a global first, the academic community has made significant breakthroughs in exploring diabetes cure through similar principles over the years.
Pluripotent stem cells, including induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and embryonic stem cells (nESCs), are sources of reproducible human cells in early development and have the potential to form any cell type in the adult body. As early as 2006, Professor Shinya Yamanaka from Kyoto University in Japan discovered that somatic cells can be "rejuvenated" and induced to return to a state similar to early embryonic development, creating iPSCs—for which he was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Professor Deng Hongkui has also been deeply engaged in this field for over 20 years. In 2013, he published a paper in Science proving that somatic cells of mice can be reprogrammed into pluripotent stem cells solely through chemical methods. Professor Deng recalled that the research caused a sensation in the global regenerative medicine community—no one expected reprogramming to be achieved in such a simple way.
In 2022, after countless failures, Professor Deng Hongkui's team successfully replicated this achievement in humans, with the research published in Nature. Compared with traditional induction methods, this new technology does not require genomic manipulation, making it more convenient and avoiding safety risks.
In addition to treating type 1 diabetes, the differentiated new islets can also be applied to type 2 diabetes patients with islet dysfunction.
Professor Cheng Xin's team from the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is also a leader in this field. Their developed novel "endodermal stem cells (EnSCs)" have successfully achieved in vitro reconstruction of islet tissue. In April this year, the team, together with scholars from Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, published research results in Cell Discovery—for the first time globally, curing a severe type 2 diabetes patient through iPSC-derived autologous regenerative islet transplantation.
Internationally, this field is also advancing rapidly. Vertex, a veteran U.S. biotechnology giant, announced in June this year that its stem cell therapy VX-880 had made significant progress: among 10 type 1 diabetes patients, 7 no longer needed insulin, 2 reduced their dosage by 70%, and all patients' blood glucose was controlled.
Unlike the aforementioned domestic treatment strategies, VX-880 uses allogeneic stem cells (i.e., "donated cells"), which can be pre-prepared and are expected to be "universal." However, compared with autologous stem cell transplantation, allogeneic transplantation may carry a higher risk of immune rejection.
Notably, in June last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Lantidra, the first cell therapy for type 1 diabetes. Although not a stem cell therapy, it uses islet cells from deceased donors. In clinical trials, 33% of patients did not require insulin for over 5 years.
On the other hand, using mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to repair islets also provides an opportunity for treating early-onset type 1 diabetes, with multiple studies underway.
However, due to issues such as immune rejection and carcinogenic risks, these cutting-edge studies are currently only permitted in a small number of severe cases. For example, to avoid rejection, Vertex has adopted strategies such as "encapsulating" transplanted islets and gene editing—but whether these work and whether additional operations increase safety risks require long-term verification.
As for the "autologous transplantation" carried out by Tianjin First Central Hospital, since the patient's type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, the immune system may still attack the new "autologous islets," which would normally require immunosuppressive regimens.
"But because the patient had previously undergone liver transplantation and was already taking immunosuppressants, our understanding of the immune response after standalone stem cell-derived islet transplantation is still limited," the researchers pointed out.
"There is still a long way to go," Professor Ding Guoshan, academic leader of organ transplantation at Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, said in a previous interview. The existing research results are preliminary. More cases, in-depth clinical trials, and further analysis are needed to truly provide a new curative therapy for the vast number of diabetes patients who have long relied on insulin injections.