Technion-led team unveils 'living' implant that senses glucose and makes insulin

Researchers led by Assistant Professor Shady Farah of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology reported in Science Translational Medicine on 28 January 2026 a living implant designed to work as an autonomous artificial pancreas. The device contains insulin-producing cells that continuously sense blood glucose, make insulin inside the body and release the amount needed, without pumps, tubes or injections.

The central problem with cell-based treatments for type 1 diabetes has always been rejection: the immune system attacks transplanted cells, so patients either need lifelong immune-suppressing drugs or the cells fail. Farah's team protected the cells with what they call a crystalline shield, a coating designed to hide them from the immune system so that the implant can keep working for years.

In diabetic mice the implant kept blood sugar under effective control over the long term, with collaborators reporting a year of steady glucose regulation. In non-human primates, the cells inside the implant stayed alive and functional, which the authors say gives strong support for moving toward clinical trials in people. Human testing has not yet begun.

The work was an international collaboration. Matthew Bochenek of MIT and Joshua Doloff of Johns Hopkins were co-first authors, and the team included scientists from Harvard and the University of Massachusetts as well as Technion researchers Merna Shaheen-Mualim, Neta Kutner and Edward Odeh. Farah began the project as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of the tissue-engineering pioneer Robert Langer at MIT before returning to Haifa to lead his own group in the Faculty of Chemical Engineering.

The researchers say the same platform could, in principle, be adapted to deliver other biological drugs that patients now take by injection, such as clotting factors for haemophilia, though that remains speculative.