Organ transplant and more important organs grown from stem cells with the right self protein will be a big deal... As for it with type-1 diabetes.. Its pretty much a non-starter. Type-1 is pretty loaded with surprises. The popular understanding is that the pancreas has failed. Therefore the appropriate solution is to replace the broken organ. Thing is, that this has been the approach to the cure for the last forever and has produced 0 cures. Now, if you lost your pancreas in a motorcycle or hunting accident tissue replacement therapy is totally the way to go. but for a more typical case this would not last. Even if you could grow a new one and replace with a copy that works and does not need anti rejection drugs, it would still be doomed to fail at some point in the future. This is because the type-1 diabetes is a symptom of a problem, not the cause of the problem. The cause is far more interesting that the symptom. This is because the cause is a autoimmune dysfunction. Something happened to a type-1 that caused their immune system to identify the Islets as not-me and therefor it needs to be attacked.. So, without that fixed you cannot hope to have much of a "cure" .. There is a lot of interesting news around these days on this though. Back in the 80's and early 90's most type-1 research was centered around tissue replacement with the big hope that stem cells could one day provide a cure. Dr. Faustman and Harvard Med was working on stem cell therapy with non obese diabetic mice. She was apparently quite frustrated with the problem of the cure working for a while then failing. Then, the first George Bush signed the exec order to make stem cell research kind of a pain to do. Dr Faustman probably did what everyone else who thought that fetal stem cells would save the world and complained up a storm. But, after that she took the time to really think through the problems that the supposed stem cell cure all were failing to fix. She started looking into the autoimmune problems. This is where things get interesting.. She started working on addressing the underlying autoimmune problem. When she succeeded at that she in her own words started making happy NOD mice. As it turns out once the autoimmune problem is resolved the islets started growing back on there own. There is a reason for this located in the spleen, turns out that the spleen produces stem cells that migrate to the pancreas and then become islets. She published her work back around 2000 and caused a fairly large freak out in the industry. The JDRF even took out a full page ad in the New York times to let folks know that she was a quack. Of course is was not long before her results were replicated in Japan. That lit a bit of a fire under US researchers and now there are a number of efforts to get the autoimmune problem. In the meantime there is the problem of making better control while reducing the number and intensity of low blood sugar events. After a fairly big letter writing campaign the FDA was finally convinced to allow real work on an artificial pancreas. Its a pump a CGMS married by a computer to do the numeric analysis and automatically manage blood sugar. The current first gen devices will stop basal insulin flow to reduce or prevent low blood sugar. The next gen will do that and prevent high blood sugar. There is even a company working on a wireless/tubeless system that has insulin CGMS and glucagon on board.

Of course all of this pretty much leaves out type-2. Type-2 is a metabolic problem. The pancreas is still able to produce insulin. But for a variety of reasons its not being used very well. While the popular belief is that this only happens to fat sedentary folks it is also happening to people who do not fit the usual mold for being at risk for type-2. When people talk about diabetes being a billion dollar a year industry.. They mean treatments/drugs for type-2. They make up 90% of the diabetes population end up suffering from complications more often and all the cinnamon and hemp oil in the world will not "cure" them. Not to say that you cannot recover.. But the path to type-2 recovery is about as different from person to person as there are people who need to recover. For the last 70 years type-2 has often been viewed as the easier of the two. Probably because it can be managed with oral meds. But, I am pretty sure that we are rapidly headed towards a world where we will find that curing type-1 will turn out to be the easy one and we will find that we need to do a lot of learning before we can really get anywhere on type-2.

Which leaves us with the awesomeness that stem cells can actually do. They will eventually be the end all in tissue replacement therapy. In a few decades people will be able to get replacement parts nearly on demand with no worry about anti-rejection drugs. This will result in some amazing things.