First Global Congress Devoted to Type 1 Diabetes Opens in Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA — The first global congress devoted entirely to type 1 diabetes opens Friday in Philadelphia, bringing researchers, clinicians, industry leaders and patient advocates to the Pennsylvania Convention Center for two and a half days.
The Breakthrough T1D Clinical & Research Congress, known as CRC 2026, runs through Sunday, Oct. 11. It is the inaugural edition of what organizers describe as a one-of-a-kind forum focused solely on type 1 diabetes, according to an announcement from Breakthrough T1D, the research and advocacy organization formerly known as JDRF.
To understand why the meeting matters, it helps to understand what the disease demands. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. Without insulin, the body cannot move sugar from the blood into cells, so people with the condition must take insulin every day for the rest of their lives.
There are no days off. Patients, many of them children, check blood sugar constantly, count every carbohydrate, and calculate insulin doses around meals, exercise, stress and illness. Too little insulin sends blood sugar soaring. Too much can plunge it dangerously low within minutes, causing confusion, seizures or loss of consciousness. Parents of young children often set alarms through the night to check their child’s levels.
Over the years, poorly controlled blood sugar damages eyes, kidneys, nerves and the heart. And the financial cost is relentless, with insulin, glucose monitors and pumps adding up month after month. It is this grinding daily reality that the congress is trying to change.
The scale of diabetes in the United States is vast. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Diabetes Statistics Report, 40.1 million Americans, or 12 percent of the population, had diabetes in 2023, and 11 million of them did not know it.
Type 1 diabetes accounts for about 2.1 million of those cases, including 1.8 million adults and 314,000 children and adolescents, the CDC reported. Another 115.2 million adults have prediabetes.
There are real reasons for hope, researchers say, and several will be on stage this weekend. In 2022, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first therapy that can delay the onset of type 1 diabetes, teplizumab, for people in the early stages of the disease — a shift from merely managing blood sugar to changing the course of the disease itself.
On Saturday, SAB Biotherapeutics will present data on SAB-142, an investigational immunotherapy designed to preserve the body’s own insulin production in people newly diagnosed. The company said the oral presentation is scheduled for 1:10 p.m. in the exhibition area.
Cell replacement is the other frontier. A University of Chicago trial pairing donor islet transplants with tegoprubart, an immune-calming drug from Eledon Pharmaceuticals, was featured on NBC Nightly News. A participant is living without external insulin 13 years after her diagnosis, according to Breakthrough T1D. NewCelX, another company attending the congress, is developing lab-grown islet cells combined with the same drug ahead of a planned early-stage trial, the company said.
Artificial intelligence and so-called digital twin technology, virtual models of a patient used to predict blood sugar, are also on the agenda, pointing to a future in which managing the disease gets less relentless.
The research matters beyond type 1 diabetes. Type 2 is a different disease, driven by insulin resistance rather than an immune attack, but the two share complications, and advances cross over. Glucose monitors and insulin pumps refined in type 1 care are now widely used in type 2. Drugs developed for type 2, like GLP-1s, are being studied as add-on therapies in type 1. And if lab-grown replacement cells ever work at scale, they could one day help people with advanced type 2 diabetes who depend on insulin too.
More than 80 scientific sessions are scheduled, also covering the shortage of endocrinologists and new screening guidelines aimed at catching type 1 diabetes before its first crisis. Many children are still diagnosed only after arriving at the hospital in diabetic ketoacidosis, a dangerous emergency.
“The first Breakthrough T1D Clinical & Research Congress is inspired by the belief that drives our work: people with type 1 diabetes deserve better care options today as we work toward a future without this condition,” Aaron J. Kowalski, Ph.D., the organization’s chief executive officer, said in the announcement.
The congress runs Oct. 9 through 11 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. For families living with the disease’s daily arithmetic, the gathering is a measure of how far the field has come, and how urgently it wants to go further.
