3D printing could enable a safer prolonged therapy for type 1 diabetes

Researchers have 3D-printed devices made of insulin production cells. These devices could enable long treatment for type 1 diabetes that would cause the people to produce their insulin without requiring invasive surgery.

Becuse people with type 1 diabetes cannot make enough insulin to regulate their blood sugar, they have to constantly handle their condition, usually with injections and dietary conditions. A prolonged treatment involves the transplantation of human Holme clusters of insulin production cells that typically grow in the pancreas from donors. But like organ transplantation, this invasive reign requirement.

“Current practice is to inject these human holmer through the portal friend into the liver,” says Quentin Perrier at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina. However, about half of the implanted Holme quickly loses their functionality, which means that people have to undergo more transplants to make the effective treatment.

If islands could be placed directly under the skin, surgery would not only be less invasive, but it would also give less of stress and inflammation that shorts the functional life of the cells.

“The higher the density [of islets]The less the size of the device you need to plant in the patient, ”says Adam Feinberg at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and Biotech Company Fluid Form Bio in Massachusetts.

To achieve the high density printed Perrier and his colleagues 3D -Holmer from a “bioink” made of human pancreatic tissue and alginate, a type of carbohydrate derived from seaweed. Live insulin producer cells were mixed in this material.

“We put this bioink with [human] Islet in a syringe and we are printing a special motive [with it]”Says Perrier. This porous grid is designed to allow new blood vessels to grow the environment and through the structure.

In the laboratory, this technique works “very well”, Perrier says, noting that about 90 percent of Islets’ cells survived and worked for up to three weekends. “The next challenge is really to validate this finding in vivo.“Perrier and his colleagues presented their research in the European Society for Body Transplantation (ESOT) 2025 meeting in London on June 29.

Feinberg and his colleagues have also 3D printed their Holme. Their technique is to produce a frame by printing cells and collagen directly in a hydrogel polymer – “kind like 3D printing inside hair gel,” he says. It was presented at the International Pancreas & Islet Transplant Association 2025 meeting in Pisa, Italy on June 16. In Diabetic Lab -Mus, the islands restored normal glucose control for up to six months.

Feinberg says Perrier’s work is “definitely promising” but that the inherent variation in the human tissue used to do, the islands could pose challenges in a living body. “It’s like fewing have transplanted organ,” he says. “We one side, the material may work better. On the flip side it is variable and difficult to get and it is a really difficult problem to solve.

To avoid such a transplant from says both Feinberg and Perrier stem cell therapies that take the future of type 1 diabetes treatment. Using stem cells in the 3D printing process – Instatead of the cells they currently use – could solve a lot of dims at once, they say.