Douglas Melton has two compelling reasons to go to work every day: his children Sam and Emma, both of whom have Type 1 diabetes. After decades teaching at Harvard, where he co-founded the Harvard Stem Cell Institute searching for a cure, he left in 2022 to work at Vertex Pharmaceuticals to turn his research into a stem-cell treatment for the disease into reality. In 2025, he and his team reported the results of the first small study: a dozen people with Type 1 diabetes received pancreatic cells, made from stem cells that were trained to make the insulin their bodies could not. One year after just a single treatment, 10 of them no longer need insulin to regulate their blood sugar (and the other two patients require lower doses than they had previously used). Vertex plans to continue studying the therapy in hopes of one day helping many of the 9.5 million people worldwide living with the disease.
