Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina are testing a new approach to Type 1 diabetes that aims to do more than manage the disease. 

Their plan combines lab-grown insulin-producing cells with engineered immune cells designed to protect those transplanted cells from attack. 

The project is in the research stage, but scientists say the goal is to create a treatment that could restore insulin production without requiring patients to depend only on daily insulin therapy.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. The body’s immune system mistakenly attacks its own beta cells in the pancreas. Beta cells are the cells that produce insulin. 

Without enough working beta cells, the body cannot properly control blood sugar levels, hence people with Type 1 diabetes must monitor glucose and use insulin to regulate their body. 

Researchers involved in the project said about 1.5 million Americans live with the disease, which can lead to serious complications over time. 

The new treatment plan has two main aspects. 

First, researchers are creating islet cells, including beta cells, from stem cells in the lab. This is meant to help solve one of the major problems with traditional islet transplants: limited donor tissue. 

Current transplants can require cells from several donors, which makes treatment difficult to scale. By producing the cells in a lab, researchers hope to create a more stable and available supply. 

The second part focuses on the immune system. The team is engineering regulatory T cells, also called Tregs, with chimeric antigen receptors. These modified immune cells are designed to find the transplanted beta cells and help protect them. 

According to the researchers, the goal is to stop the immune system from attacking the new cells after transplant. If that works, the treatment could reduce or avoid the need for immunosuppressive drugs, which are commonly used after transplants and can carry long-term risks. 

Researchers say the project is intended to simultaneously address two major barriers in Type 1 diabetes treatment: replacing the cells lost to the disease and preventing the immune system from destroying those replacements. 

The long-term goal is to create what scientists describe as an “off-the-shelf” therapy, meaning the beta cells could be made in advance, frozen, stored and later used for treatment. 

The researchers also said they hope the therapy could eventually work for people at different stages of the disease, including those who have had Type 1 diabetes for many years. 

The treatment is not ready for patients. The work has only been tested in preclinical studies using humanized mice. In those studies, researchers reported that the protective effects lasted up to one month, which is the longest period examined so far. 

The team said the next steps are to test whether the protection can last longer, whether different delivery methods improve results and whether repeated doses could strengthen the therapy over time. 

The project has received $1 million in funding from Breakthrough T1D to support that work. 

While the research is still in early stages, it reflects a broader shift in Type 1 diabetes research. Instead of focusing only on symptom management, this approach is trying to both replace the missing insulin-producing cells and change the immune response that caused the damage. 

Researchers say more testing is needed before any clinical use, but the project offers another possible direction for future Type 1 diabetes treatment.