Two years ago JDRF moved from the concept of a cure to identifying what are called six cure therapies, or therapeutic cures--it works either way--because of the fact that research has shown that there will not be a single eureka moment. There will be steps along the way to achieving what we called a cure when we were back in the black hole of basic research.
Also, for people in different stages of diabetes, there will be different cures. They include the restoration of normal blood sugar that could come, for example, through islet transplants, which currently have other issues and are not the simple answer to that. For people who have islet transplants or for people like me who have a new pancreas, they don't eliminate the process of attack by our autoimmune system, the T cells. Therefore, recurrence is an issue.
That leads to prevention, which is a third area.
I'm just giving this as background to what you asked, which was the research path. There is nothing clear in terms of what the end result will look like, because it's hard to get scientists to ever talk about things like that, even behind closed doors.
But there is very definitely a direction. It's somewhat like knowing what you're looking for and seeing it behind the glass but having to figure out how you break the glass to get there. The steps that will allow us to proceed to the next stage have to be identified, and then the stages to the end have to be identified.