Professor Marc Turner, (right) the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service's associate medical director, said the technique would end the need to do the "high-risk surgical procedure" of transplanting a donor pancreas into a patient.

"The majority of people in Scotland with diabetes control it with diet and drugs. However, some have great difficulty in controlling their diabetes as their blood sugar swings up and down, so this development should enable us to offer a way of controlling their diabetes more successfully. For those patients who do need a pancreas transplant, which is a high-risk surgical procedure, it will be a much more straight-forward and safe procedure."

About 12 patients a year will be able to receive the new treatment. People who will benefit from the new treatment are those with Type 1, or insulin dependent diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune disease caused when insulin-producing cells are destroyed by cells that normally defend the body from invading organisms.

Transplant surgeon (left) John Casey  is the lead clinician for the Islet Cell programme. He said that at the moment the technique depends on organs from deceased donors adding that work being done at Edinburgh University gives hope that "in the not too distant future" islets will be able to be produced from stem cells.

Professor Kevin Docherty’s (right) team at the University of Aberdeen also studies diabetes, focusing on how the body makes insulin by looking at the potential of human Embryonic Stem Cells (hESCs) differentiation into pancreatic cells.

He was quoted two years ago : “We are interested in the extent to which we can mimic the human pancreas and recapitulate these events in culture.”

Although insulin-making cells have been found, fully functioning pancreatic cells had not.  He thought then that these were five to ten years away, noting is it clear how many cells would be needed to cure diabetes. A successful islet transplant requires more than 0.5 million islets. The equivalent in terms of pancreatic stem cells might exceed one billion cells, which highlights a key challenge of this industry: how to scale up.

Islet transplants have been a contraversial subject  with US and Italian researchers questioning costs and need for powerful immuno-suppressant drugs to stop bodies rejecting the cells.