Even the most exciting breakthrough medical treatment can be rendered obsolete by a particularly insurmountable obstacle: time.

If a treatment only works temporarily, it has little chance of making a significant difference in the lives of patients, which is why the latest news from the University of Miami’s Diabetes Research Institute is so exciting.

A year after transplanting insulin-producing islet cells into the omentum of a woman with a particularly unwieldy form of type 1 diabetes, the cells continue to operate as hoped.