3D printing could enable a long-term treatment for type 1 diabetes
Small, 3D-printed devices, designed to be implanted directly under the skin, could allow people with type 1 diabetes to produce their own insulin
By Meagan Mulcair
3 July 2025
People with type 1 diabetes can’t produce enough insulin to regulate their blood sugar
Halfpoint Images/Getty Images
Researchers have 3D printed devices made of insulin-producing cells. These devices could enable a long-term treatment for type 1 diabetes that would let people produce their own insulin – without requiring invasive surgery.
Because people with type 1 diabetes cannot make enough insulin to regulate their blood sugar, they must constantly manage their condition, usually with injections and dietary precautions. One longer-term treatment involves transplanting human islets – clusters of insulin-producing cells that typically grow in the pancreas – from donors. But like an organ transplant, this requires invasive surgery.
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“Current practice is to inject these human islets through the portal vein into the liver,” says Quentin Perrier at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina. However, about half of the implanted islets quickly lose their functionality, which means people must undergo several transplantations to make the treatment effective.
If islets could be placed directly under the skin, surgery would not only be less invasive, but it would also produce less of the stress and inflammation that shortens the cells’ functional life.
“The higher the density [of islets], the smaller the size of the device you would need to plant in the patient,” says Adam Feinberg at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and the biotech company FluidForm Bio in Massachusetts.
