I'm a T1D for 45 years, and since my first diagnosis there has always been a cure that would be available "within the decade". This is the way.

That being said, every decade has seen life-changing therapies introduced. The introduction of long-lasting insulins. At home testing for glucose and ketones in urine. Mixing insulin formulations together to reduce the number of injections at a time. Thinner needles greatly reduced pain from injections (this one happened almost every year.) Moving from urine tests to blood glucose tests! Introducing shorter-acting insulins that reduce onset time. GLUCOMETERS! Moving from needles to pens allowed crazy-simple and virtually painless injections. Moving from pork formulations to human formulations of insulin. Carb counting: previously we used fixed diet - eat the same thing at the same time every freaking day. INSULIN PUMPS!!! Crazy fast-acting insulin formulations cutting onset down to 15 minutes. CONTINUOUS GLUCOSE MONITORING!!! Tracking and alerting for low glucose, overnight and remote. CUSTOM-BUILT CLOSED LOOPING!!! Reliable/medical grade CGM. Approved closed looping systems.

Many folks have worked very hard to make my life more livable, and I thank them for it. Today is, without a doubt, the best time to be a diabetic.

That being said, I still wouldn't recommend it;)

I wonder if there's any good reason to reduce my pessimism about it: I can't help but think there are such strong economic incentives against having a cure (vs ongoing treatment) that it's very unlikely to become available during my lifetime.

I don't know much about medical research, but I've looked into some of these trials. They are generally being done by startups and not the established players who sell the diabetes management stuff.

So think disruptive tech. A new player comes into the market with something that obsoletes the old tech, and maybe destroys a whole market. But that new player makes their own money off it.

So yeah, maybe Tandem, Dexcom and Medtronic don't have a big incentive. But someone else can make some real money if they can find a cure or novel treatment that obsoletes all those others things.

I don't want to feed your pessimism too much but I think the general culture of being too reserved with funding and testing is going to do more harm than that.

The reason for the immunosuppressants is not the same as for a classic organ transplant. For a normal organ transplant, you need immunosuppressants because otherwise the body will recognise the new organ as being a foreign body that it doesn't recognise as self. For a stem cell transplant, the immune system has already gone around destroying every pancreatic beta cell it can find. The immune system is primed, and it absolutely recognises beta cells as something to destroy. The end goal is to encapsulate the inserted beta cells in a membrane that allows glucose in and insulin out, but keeps the immune system away.