I’m hoping this is something someone here can explain simply.
When someone’s heart, liver, or kidneys give up, we can do a transplant of the relevant organ, using either a living tissue donor or a deceased one. From my understanding (please correct me if I’m wrong), in most cases, type 1 diabetes stems from or correlates with a non functioning pancreas. So why can’t we do pancreas transplants for patients with T1D to either cure the disease or improve those patients’ quality of life?
In: Biology
T1D is more an autoimmune disease than anything else. So the insulin producing cells of the new pancreas would just get destroyed just like they were in the old one. So that has been tried and it didn’t work.
Pancreas transplants are a thing, [Johns Hopkins article](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/pancreas-transplant ). Finding organs is always a problem, and there is a much cheaper solution, insulin injections, so the procedure is much less common.
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