The global incidence of diabetes is increasing year by year, but although the existing treatments can control blood glucose and reduce complications to some extent, none of them can fundamentally save and restore the damaged islet function. In particular, patients with type 1 diabetes require lifelong insulin therapy because of almost complete loss of islet function. Therefore, scholars from different countries have started to work on a new therapeutic strategy – replenishing the patient’s body with new islet beta cells with normal secretion function. Stem cell transplantation has received much attention in recent years as a potential method to achieve this goal. Studies have shown that bone marrow stem cell transplantation therapy, including hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) and mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) transplantation, has good prospects for clinical application. Scholars at home and abroad have conducted exploratory treatment studies on type 1 diabetic patients, even type 2 diabetic patients with poor islet function, and found that the pancreatic β-cell function of some diabetic patients improved significantly after treatment, and some patients could stop insulin therapy or reduce the dose of insulin in a short period of time. However, these studies were mostly single-center, self-control before-and-after study designs with small sample sizes, and their long-term effectiveness is not yet certain. Moreover, there are still many obstacles to reconstructing islet function using stem cell technology; the issue of immune rejection remains to be addressed, and the risk of tumors is difficult to rule out, among others. A recent article published in the prestigious medical journal Cell reported that researchers have succeeded in generating hundreds of millions of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells from embryonic stem cells, which is considered a major step toward a cure for diabetes. Douglas Melton et al. of Harvard University’s Division of Stem Cell Research and Transplantation used a human embryonic stem cell line and two human induced pluripotent stem cell lines to generate hundreds of millions of glucose-responsive beta cells in vitro through 4-5 weeks of differentiation, which lowered blood glucose when transplanted into diabetic mice. It is well known that the limited number of donor islets and the difficulty of replicating beta cells in vitro have greatly limited the application of transplantation to generate human beta cells for the treatment of diabetes in previous studies. In contrast, this new study by Professor Melton, which enables an unlimited supply of stem cells derived as beta cells that can secrete insulin and respond to the challenge of glucose, means that islet function can be reestablished, which will provide new options for cellular therapy for diabetes and offer new hope as far as diabetes is concerned. The researchers are also testing these stem cell-derived beta cells in a non-human primate model. And the team is collaborating with MIT to develop an implantable device to protect stem cell-derived beta cells from immune attack. Professor Elaine Fuchs of Rockefeller University believes this is one of the most important advances in stem cell research. For decades, researchers have continued to try to create human pancreatic beta cells that can be cultured in insulin-secreting conditions and pass on for long periods of time. Melton and his colleagues are now able to overcome this hurdle, opening the door to a major step forward in the field of diabetic stem cell therapy by transplanting diabetes. Of course a lot of work needs to be done to make this truly clinical, and the long-term survival of stem cells in this new stem cell therapy, autoimmune issues, and tumor risk still need to be looked at.