The findings, published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, may eventually contribute to better outcomes for patients with insulin-dependent diabetes.

Transplanting pancreatic islets with their insulin-producing cells can relieve patients with insulin-dependent diabetes from daily insulin injections. However, the procedure faces a significant challenge in that many transplanted cells fail to survive, so a larger number of donor islets than would otherwise be needed must be transplanted to offset the losses that occur during the early phase of transplantation.