A Chicago Trial Got 10 of 12 Patients Off Insulin. A 2006 Trial Saw Most Relapse Within Two Years.

Ten of twelve adults with decades-long Type 1 diabetes have stopped taking insulin after a University of Chicago Medicine pilot trial paired donated islet cells with an experimental antibody drug. Eledon Pharmaceuticals, the drug's maker, reported the result on March 16 at a diabetes technology conference in Barcelona. The finding is preliminary. The cohort has been followed for an average of eight months, not years.

Katie Beth Hand, a 40-year-old mother of four from Arkansas, is one of the ten. She had lived with Type 1 diabetes for 13 years before her transplant on January 13, 2026, and stopped her long-acting insulin a week later. By March 3, she was off insulin entirely, with a most recent A1C of 5.1 percent, under the 6.5 percent threshold used to diagnose diabetes. 'My head is so quiet now,' she said. 'I've been running a mental algorithm for all these years.'

How the transplant works

The procedure is minimally invasive. Surgeons inject donor islet cells, the pancreas cells that produce insulin, directly into the liver under local anesthesia, since the native pancreas in Type 1 diabetes no longer makes them. Patients then receive the drug tegoprubart by infusion every three weeks instead of the calcineurin-inhibitor drugs that have long been standard after transplants, a class tied to kidney and nerve damage. Piotr Witkowski, director of the Pancreas and Islet Transplant Program at UChicago Medicine, is leading the investigator-initiated trial, funded by the nonprofit Breakthrough T1D.

Eledon reported no rejection episodes and no new donor-specific antibodies among the 12 patients through the trial's current follow-up window. The company also said it saw no nephrotoxicity, hypertension, or neurotoxicity tied to tegoprubart itself, though some patients needed a dose adjustment to a companion drug, mycophenolic acid, to manage side effects.

'T1D patients have been waiting decades for a potential functional cure, and it is very encouraging to see meaningful progress in that direction through the emerging promise of tegoprubart,' said David-Alexandre Gros, Eledon's chief executive, in the March announcement.

What the trial hasn't answered

The open question is durability, not whether islet transplants can work in the short term. Healthcare Brew, reporting on the Eledon data, cited a 2006 trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in which a similar transplant approach, without tegoprubart, achieved insulin independence in most patients at first. Within two years, 76 percent needed insulin again. Mandy Ford, a transplant immunologist at the Emory Transplant Center, told Healthcare Brew that calling the newer results a cure is 'a big if.'

“The most important unknown is long-term durability and safety. These findings will need to be confirmed in larger, multicenter trials with longer follow-up.”

There is also a supply problem built into the approach itself. Allan Kirk, a transplant surgeon at Duke University, told Healthcare Brew that even if tegoprubart holds up in larger trials, very few people would be able to get it, because usable islet cells depend on a limited pool of deceased organ donors.

Eledon says it plans to seek FDA guidance on a regulatory path later in 2026 and has opened a second study testing tegoprubart in patients who have both Type 1 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. The company is also pursuing a separate Phase 3 trial of the same drug in kidney transplant patients generally, a larger and more conventional transplant population.