An MIT alginate microcapsule holding islet cells (in green) and being covered by immune cells (in blue and magenta). Image credit: Omid Veiseh, Joshua Doloff, Minglin Ma and Arturo Vegas.

There’s a worldwide deficit in insulin-producing beta cells, for people with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes, Harvard’s Doug Melton told a session at the ADA annual scientific conference on Friday.

“It’s a completely non-trivial thing that you can now make billions of human beta cells,” he said. “We spent more than a decade trying to march these cells through this procedure.”

Currently, it takes his lab about 40 days to produce the cells at a cost of about $6,000 per flask, but Melton is confident that these numbers can be chopped down.

The achievement required not only brilliant scientific detective legwork, especially on the last steps of differentiation, but lab drudgework on a dramatic scale.

Picking apart the steps that drive cells into beta shape, “we had to sort out three or four factors at a time,” he noted. The lab ran screens of small molecules to find what combinations were effective. Testing eight small molecules, in three concentrations, for different periods, in triplicate meant about 65,000 combinations to examine per screen.

The lab of MIT bioengineer Dan Anderson, collaborating with Melton to build microcapsules for the beta cells, took high-volume testing to a much higher level for various capsule designs.

Over the decades, many groups have tried to encapsulate beta cells in tiny spheres of alginate. Historically, “all these capsules end up covered in scar tissue,” Anderson told the ADA session.

But after endlessly tweaking the properties of these spheres, “we have a growing list of materials we could use,” he said.

One capsule material seems to work well in mice with strong immune systems—and in very early testing in macaques. Details on the material aren’t yet public, but the secret isn’t in the material’s permeability but in how the immune system reacts to it, Anderson said.

His group’s exhaustive testing also gave clues to how capsule size affects immune scarring. Last month, he and colleagues reported in Nature Materials that 1.5-mm-diameter capsules do better than 0.5-mm structures. Was that a surprise? “It was for us,” Anderson replied. “We thought smaller would be better.”