Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help accelerate the translation of beta cell research into clinical trials and routine NHS care for people with type 1 diabetes.

The Department delivers research into type 1 diabetes through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

As well as funding research itself, the Department invests significantly in centres of excellence which support and deliver health and care research. Collectively these form the NIHR infrastructure.

NIHR infrastructure supports research to help accelerate the development of treatments for type 1 diabetes. This includes, for example, research into earlier diagnosis and improved risk prediction to identify people who may benefit from disease-modifying or beta cell-preserving therapies. It also includes support for the development and testing of beta cell replacement, stem cell-derived islet, and immune-modulating therapies.

The NIHR infrastructure provides the end-to-end system needed to design, test, and deliver new therapies, playing a central role in delivery of clinical trials and ensuring that effective innovations are supported into practice at scale.

The NIHR is also supporting a new United Kingdom-wide Type 1 Diabetes Cell Therapy Clinical Trials Network. Funded by the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, this £5 million NIHR-backed programme aims to build a nationwide infrastructure across NIHR Biomedical Research Centres and Clinical Research Facilities for cell-therapy trials. This network is designed to address shared challenges in delivering cell therapy trials, ensuring all people with the condition gain access to the latest cutting-edge treatments as early as possible.