That’s a key question, Michael. Hanuman Medical Foundation was created to fund essential research to test a particular modality of therapy for type 1 diabetes: the use of an alginate sheet to encapsulate living islet cells, implanted in patients with the disease. The developers of the Islet Sheet have attempted for many years to obtain basic levels of funding from the dominant nonprofit funders simply to test this therapeutic modality, but have been ignored in favor of research that has not made appreciable progress toward a practical cure.

If this disease is to be cured, we believe that new ideas about therapy need to be tested and developed. We further believe, based on their products of the last two decades, that the traditional academic research institutions are not likely to be the incubators of successful therapies. So we have determined that we must create the mechanisms of funding ourselves if we are to see real progress in curing type 1 diabetes.