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1. CRISPR Therapeutics
Perhaps the most exciting recent study in diabetes has been the use of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9, the gene-editing tool, to reverse diabetes. One of the primary ways diabetes develops is a shortage of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. A 2016 study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health showed that transplanting pancreatic cells can come close to curing type 1 diabetes. That procedure comes with some drawbacks. It requires a hard-to-find cadaver donor, and the recipient must take immunosuppressant drugs to prevent the body from rejecting the transplant.
To get around those constraints, ViaCyte and CRISPR joined forces in 2018, using CRISPR, to engineer stem cells to be immune-evasive, insulin-producing pancreatic cells. Preliminary results have shown that these cells do indeed mature into normal human pancreatic tissue. That could serve as a functional cure for many
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