It's a really exciting time in diabetes research. When we talk about childhood diabetes we're usually talking about type 1, although, as I said, there is an increasing prevalence of type 2. Most exciting is that we have access to such incredible technology in regenerative medicine and stem cell biology in gene editing.
One area of research that has a great Canadian story that's gone from the laboratory to clinical trial is in the transplantation of insulin-producing cells into people with type 1 diabetes. It started with pancreatic islet transplantation in Edmonton. It has gone from our ability now—and some of this work was done at UBC—in being able to make insulin-producing cells from stem cells, and now that's in clinical trials in adults with type 1 diabetes, with sites in Edmonton and Vancouver.
The big issue for us is that we really want to see some of these therapies being able to be given to children, and there are issues with that. For example, with stem cell therapies the recipients still need the immune suppression, so ethically they're not in a position to do that with kids; we need more safety studies. However, this is a very promising area of research that looks like it could lead to people with type 1 diabetes being insulin-free. I'm not sure I'd call it a functional cure, as they would still need to take immunosuppressive drugs, but we could give them better sugar control, and they could potentially be free of insulin.