2005
Fernandez Vina leads a team that successfully carried out the treatment, in which stem cells are injected into the pancreas, does not involve risks of rejection, requires no prolonged inpatient treatment, and any physician trained in and skilled with catheterization could perform it. This was the team that successfully carried out the first implant of its kind January 3 on an insulin-dependent diabetic patient at San Nicolas Hospital in the town of San Nicolas, north of Buenos Aires.

2004

A research team at Seoul National University in South Korea reported in February 2004 that it produced a human embryonic stem cell line through the use of somatic cell nuclear transfer, a procedure commonly known as "therapeutic cloning." The creation of human embryonic stem cells through this method provides proof-of-principle that this technique might someday provide stem cell lines that could be used to develop curative therapies for a wide range of diseases afflicting hundreds of millions of people around the world.

2003

A team under Mick Bhatia, Ph.D., of the John P. Robarts Research Institute in Canada reported that transplanted adult stem cells derived from bone marrow can induce the recipient’s pancreatic tissue to repair itself, restoring normal insulin production and reversing symptoms associated with diabetes in animal models of diabetes.

Harvard University molecular biologist Douglas Melton, Ph.D., announced in November 2003 that his lab had developed 17 human embryonic stem cell lines and plans to provide the cells to the American Type Culture Collection in Virginia and the UK Stem Cell Bank for distribution to researchers worldwide. Dr. Melton’s work was funded by JDRF and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. To put this accomplishment in context, current U.S. policy has limited the number of available embryonic stem cell lines available to federally-funded researchers to 12.

2002

Several important studies provided proof of principle of the ability of stem cells to transform into any type of cell, illustrating their potential to form the basis for critically-needed medical therapies for type 1 diabetes:

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine created insulin-producing cells from mouse embryonic stem cells. The insulin-producing cells formed islet-like clusters, which when transplanted into diabetic mice, reduced blood sugar and increased lifespan.

Researchers at the
University of Minnesota’s Stem Cell Institute derived stem cells from adult bone marrow that normally differentiate only into certain tissues. These experiments demonstrated that stem cells can develop into cells of all three embyronic germ layers, suggesting that, in theory, they could differentiate into any of the body’s cells.

Researchers in Singapore grew human embryonic stem cells without using a layer of animal cells or animal protein factors to maintain them, an important breakthrough if embryonic stem cells are to be used for treating type 1 diabietes and other diseases.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University, and Harvard University developed a microarray or "gene chip" specifically tailored to type 1 diabetes that should speed the discovery of genes involved in getting stem cells to differentiate into beta cells.

Read more at jdrf.org