In a laboratory in Geneva, researchers have created a protective gel that could one day free millions of people from daily insulin injections. Called Amniogel, this innovative hydrogel—derived from the human amniotic membrane, the innermost layer of membranes surrounding a fetus—represents a decisive breakthrough in treating type 1 diabetes, a condition where the immune system destroys the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas.
Type 1 diabetes forces patients to inject insulin every day for life to keep blood sugar balanced. Scientists have long known that transplanting pancreatic islets—small clusters of insulin-producing cells—can temporarily restore the body's natural blood sugar control and eliminate the need for injections. Yet this approach has remained limited by a critical shortage of donors and a devastating problem: when transplanted islets are placed into the liver, the standard site, they suffer from inflammation, loss of their natural structural support, and poor blood supply. These hostile conditions cause the grafts to fail.
A team led by Ekaterine Berishvili, Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Geneva and Head of the Cell Isolation and Transplantation Laboratory at Geneva University Hospitals, developed Amniogel to solve this problem. The gel is obtained from the placenta after birth and works by restoring the survival signals that islets lose during isolation. Critically, it allows a network of tiny blood vessels to self-assemble inside the gel before transplantation. Once the construct is implanted, this pre-formed network connects seamlessly with the host's own blood supply, providing the durable support that isolated islets desperately need. Laboratory tests also revealed that the gel slows the migration of immune cells that would otherwise attack the transplanted graft.
"This gel creates a protective, natural-like environment in which we embed pancreatic islets together with vessel-forming cells," Berishvili explained. "Before transplantation, those cells self-organize into a network of microvessels surrounding the islets, so the graft arrives pre-vascularized."
The results speak for themselves. When thin, disk-shaped grafts measuring approximately 9 millimeters in diameter were successfully transplanted into diabetic mice, they maintained normal blood sugar levels for at least 100 days—the full duration of the follow-up study. This performance significantly outpaced both islets transplanted alone and constructs without this engineered blood vessel network. The research, published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology, represents the kind of leap forward that translates laboratory promise into real possibility.
What makes this achievement particularly significant is that Amniogel is produced through a GMP-compatible process, the rigorous manufacturing standard required for eventual clinical use in humans. This is not a distant dream; it is a pathway being paved right now. The immediate next step is to scale up the approach—producing larger grafts or greater numbers of them to meet the requirements for human treatment. Berishvili called this "a decisive step toward the development of a functional bioartificial pancreas."
Beyond diabetes, the implications expand further still. Amniogel could be adapted to house many other types of cells, opening doors to cell transplantation therapies across multiple conditions. For the millions living with type 1 diabetes, this work offers something profound: a glimpse of a future where managing their condition no longer means a lifetime of needles.