INSULIN has prolonged the lives of people with diabetes since the 1920s, but it has not stopped blindness, kidney failure and other complications of the disease. Fresh hope that diabetes could actually be cured has come from the University of Miami Diabetes Research Institute in the US, where doctors have already reversed the course of the disease in some patients and allowed them to live without insulin. The treatment involves a combination of pancreas islet cell and bone marrow transplantation. Calling the findings "the most important major step forward" in diabetes research, Dr Daniel Mintz, director of the institute, said that "there is now a real possibility that diabetes can be permanently reversed".