Stem cell therapy for insulin-dependent diabetes: Are we still on the road?

Table 2 Advantages and disadvantages of different types of stem cell therapy for diabetes

Cell types	Advantages	Disadvantages	Ref.
Embryonic stem cell	High degree of differentiation	ESCs is weak in directional differentiation and difficult to induce	[35,36]
		There are ethical issues: ESCs are usually allogeneic
		Teratoma, immune rejection and gene mutation may occur after transplantation
Induced pluripotent stem cell	IPSC technology does not use embryonic or egg cells, so ethical problems are less likely	At present, the differentiation scheme of induced pluripotent stem cells is not mature, and the induction efficiency is low, the stability is poor, and the cost is high	[39]
	Proprietary stem cells can be made from a patient's own cells, so there is less immune rejection	The use of virus vectors poses security problems
Adult stem cell	It is easy to achieve targeted differentiation, and some studies have shown that adult stem cells can be used to treat diabetes	The direction of differentiation is limited, not omnipotent	[43,44]
		After transplantation, the ability of induced differentiated cells to secrete insulin was usually lower than that of normal islet β cells, and the cell survival rate was also lower
		The efficiency of inducing differentiation at different stages is still low based on reprogramming and small molecule screening

IPSC: Induced pluripotent stem cell.