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Comment by lolc | Hacker News Reader

As a type 1 I'm obviously interested in such development. But if they do it only "for people unable to safely control type 1 diabetes" there must be a serious downside.

Ah, they only say this in the image caption but you have to take the immunosuppressives forever to keep the injected cells. Some of my own cells are still alive so I could just start taking these drugs to protect them from my immune system. I don't think I want to though.

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I think this is a huge huge development because in my opinion, islets of langerhans are going to be one of the first organs to be successfully generated using stem cells and transplanted into patients, mostly because of the relative simplicity of their structure (only a handful of cell types, their fragmented nature).

Demonstrating that a allotransplant works is the first step to getting a working stem cell transplant procedure (not currently necessary for most organs because allotransplantation is already known)

My coworker has type 1 and she said that life for her using the immunosuppressive drugs would be much worse since she has hers under control with a pump & continuous monitoring. But she also said that she knew someone who had gone blind, had kidneys shutdown, etc because they couldn't control it. This study seems to be targeted more at this class of type 1 diabetics.

Yes, pretty much any transplant recipient needs to do this to keep their immune system from recognizing the transplant as "foreign" and attacking it. This is an active area of research in immunology.

There is another technology that, I think, MIT developed which is a sort of envelope for cells that can protect them from antibodies without immunosuppressive drugs.

"researchers have designed a material that can be used to encapsulate human islet cells" – http://news.mit.edu/2016/pancreatic-cells-diabetes-treatment...

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