What are the biggest unmet needs in diabetes treatment today?

Despite decades of progress in diabetes care, significant unmet needs remain. The most fundamental is the absence of a widely accessible cure. Existing treatments require continuous daily management and do not restore the body’s natural insulin-producing function. For the approximately 589 million adults living with diabetes globally, this means a lifelong commitment to medication, monitoring, and the management of complications.

Scalability is a critical gap. Islet transplantation, which is the most effective existing approach to restoring insulin production, is constrained by donor organ availability and cannot be delivered at population scale. Therapies that require immunosuppressive drugs carry their own significant long-term health risks, limiting their suitability for broad patient populations. Many approaches currently in clinical development have not yet demonstrated that they can work without these drugs.

Affordability and accessibility are equally pressing concerns. Any therapy that is effective but prohibitively expensive will fail to reach the patients who need it most, particularly in lower-income countries where diabetes prevalence is growing fastest. RMS is designing its iPSC-based therapy with scalability and affordability explicitly in mind, aiming to produce a treatment that can be manufactured consistently, at scale, and made accessible to the majority of patients with diabetes.

Read about RMS’s approach to developing a scalable diabetes cure.