Af­ter years of fail­ure, Vi­a­Cyte shows off first proof-of-con­cept for di­a­betes stem cell trans­plants

Sev­en years af­ter they first tried it, Vi­a­Cyte fi­nal­ly has da­ta show­ing that their stem cell treat­ment for di­a­betes — a po­ten­tial cure — can work in a pa­tient.

The da­ta are ex­treme­ly lim­it­ed: They come from a sin­gle pa­tient. But they pro­vide, out­side ex­perts say, the first proof-of-con­cept for an ap­proach that com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing Ver­tex, and di­a­betes re­search foun­da­tions are bet­ting could even­tu­al­ly pro­vide a func­tion­al cure for many pa­tients with type 1 di­a­betes and — down the road — the mil­lions more with type 2 di­a­betes.

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