Dear Cherubs, a Stanford team says they’ve reset the immune system of diabetic mice and, in the process, stopped their immune system from self-sabotaging — without the usual career-ending chemo. According to Stanford Medicine, the mice either never developed Type 1 diabetes or were cured after receiving a combined transplant of blood-forming stem cells and donor pancreatic islets. Stanford Medicine

The setup sounds like a sci-fi roommate agreement: immune cells from donor and recipient learn to live together in the same body. In technical terms, the researchers produced mixed hematopoietic chimerism — a hybrid immune system — using a gentler, nonmyeloablative conditioning regimen rather than the bone-marrow-obliterating approaches historically used in transplant work. The team reports complete prevention of diabetes in prediabetic mice and reversal in animals with established disease. PMC+1

How they did it
The Journal of Clinical Investigation paper — led by Preksha Bhagchandani with Seung K. Kim as senior author — lays out the method: an antibody that targets CD117 (c-Kit), T-cell–depleting antibodies, brief low-dose irradiation and JAK1/2 inhibition (part of the “gentle” conditioning), followed by transplantation of mismatched donor hematopoietic cells plus islet cells. This produced durable mixed chimerism and, crucially, no graft-versus-host disease in the treated mice. The paper reports prevention of diabetes in 19 of 19 prediabetic chimeric mice and reversal of disease in nine of nine previously diabetic animals. PMC

Why it matters
Islet transplants have long been a tempting fix for Type 1 diabetes — if only we could stop the immune system from rejecting the graft or from attacking islets in the first place. This hybrid-immune trick both protects donor islets from rejection and corrects the autoimmune attack that caused the disease. Because the drugs and antibodies the team used are already in clinical use for other indications, the path to human trials feels more plausible than a random lab miracle. Stanford’s communications team was cautiously optimistic about translation. Stanford Medicine+1

Caveats and the big “but”
Mouse success does not guarantee a human cure; the clinical hurdles are real. Donor islets typically come from deceased donors, and the method as tested used matched blood stem cells and islets from the same donor — a logistical bottleneck. The paper and Stanford researchers note potential workarounds, such as scalable manufacture of islet cells from pluripotent stem cells or strategies to boost donor islet survival. Regulatory, immunological and supply problems remain. PMC+1

Hot take (mild): this is the kind of translational science you want — built on earlier work, explicit about limits, and generous with data. It’s not a human cure — not yet — but it’s a serious, well-documented step toward making the immune system play nice again.

Sources list — plain text:
Stanford Medicine — https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/11/type-1-diabetes-cure.html
Journal of Clinical Investigation (PMC) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12721898/
ScienceDaily (Stanford summary) — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/11/251126095018.htm
ScienceAlert — https://www.sciencealert.com/type-1-diabetes-cured-in-mice-given-experimental-hybrid-treatment
ResearchGate (preprint/report) — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397722831_Curing_autoimmune_diabetes_in_mice_with_islet_and_hematopoietic_cell_transplantation_after_CD117_antibody-based_conditioning