> Although the research marks a milestone in the search for treatments of type 1 diabetes, it’s important to note that the study involved one one participant, who received a low dose of cells for a short period—not enough for the patient to no longer need to control their blood sugar with injected insulin. An editorial by the journal Nature also says that some independent research groups have failed in their efforts to confirm that Sana’s method provides edited cells with the ability to evade the immune system.

To gene-edit these cells, they had to use a lentivirus vector -- a (limited form of a) class of viruses that notably includes HIV. These viral vectors work by splicing themselves into random places in the host cell's DNA. Which is fine, except that there's a non-zero chance that in the process, the virus will initiate a cancer.

When you combine that with a cell deliberately engineered to hide from the immune system, you have the ticket to a very bad time.

> We tend to think of type 2 diabetes as a disease that afflicts people who are overweight. But it can also appear in people with perfectly healthy weights—and be more deadly in them. A study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that normal-weight people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes have double the risk of dying from heart disease and other causes than overweight people with diabetes.

- https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/diabetes-can-strike-hard...

(Yes, I know this post is about Type 1... but _all_ of the talk in it when I posted this was about Type 2; and basically blaming the people with it for their condition)