A woman with Type 1 diabetes who was treated with her own stem cells subsequently started producing insulin on her own, making her the first person with this type of diabetes to reverse her condition using this new treatment.

The studies are among a handful of pioneering trials using stem cells to treat diabetes, which affects close to half a billion people worldwide. Most of them have type 2 diabetes, in which the body doesn’t produce enough insulin or its ability to use the hormone diminishes. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks islet cells in the pancreas.

A woman with type 1 diabetes was able to produce her own insulin within three months of a stem cell transplant using cells from her own body.

Using stem cells in medical treatments has long been a subject in the spotlight — both for the potential that this therapy can offer for a number of conditions and for the controversies surrounding this approach.

Two-and-a-half months post treatment, she was producing her own insulin and she has sustained that level of production for more than a year.

For the first time in the world, scientists have been able to reverse type 1 diabetes – an autoimmune disease that prevents your pancreas from making insulin – in a 25-year-old woman through a stem cell transplant of reprogrammed stem cells.