Project Goal

To control patients’ blood-sugar levels, the Chicago Project plans to produce in the laboratory an unlimited source of islet cells that are suitable and safe for transplantation in humans. By delivering a limitless source of pancreatic islet cells for transplantation in diabetic patients, members of the Chicago Project team offer the nation’s 21 million diabetics and patients throughout the world a chance at living a normal and healthy life free of the management problems of controlling diabetes.

Islet-cell transplantation offers a cell-based, functional cure for diabetes by encapsulating cells to protect against the immune system’s assaults on the recipient’s cells. These encapsulated cells will be implanted in diabetic patients and will replace the missing insulin-producing cells thereby controlling blood-sugar levels.

Through international collaboration between scientists, a series of laboratory experiments will be conducted during the first four years of the project with the goal of producing human clinical trials by year five. In the fifth year, human diabetic subjects will receive islet-cell transplantation, the results of which will eventually allow for widespread clinical application of a cell-based therapy for diabetes.