But the greatest hope is that this technology will help find a cure for a global disease, such as diabetes. For the first time, researchers succeeded in implanting Crispr-edited pancreatic cells in a man with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. First, pancreatic islet cells were taken from a deceased donor without diabetes, and then altered with the gene-editing technique Crispr-Cas12b to allow them to evade the immune response of the diabetes patient. (A subsequent report from Sana Biotechnology notes that the implanted cells were still evading the patient’s immune system after six months.) Traditionally, transplanting foreign cells into a patient has required suppressing the patient’s immune system to avoid them being rejected.