One genetic change can turn pancreatic duct cells into insulin producers

People with diabetes often lack working beta cells among the pancreas’s roughly one billion insulin producers. Harvard Medical School postdoctoral researcher Jian Li’s team, reporting in Science Translational Medicine, screened the genome by disrupting genes in ductal cells, which sometimes become beta cells on their own, and found that deactivating a gene made those duct cells produce and release insulin when blood sugar is high.