Common seaweed could help revolutionise the treatment of type one diabetes - the most severe form of the disease which affects around 11,000 New Zealanders.
An experimental trial in Australia is raising hopes of one day ending sufferers' dependence on insulin.
Janice Stewart has battled diabetes since she was a child, having to inject insulin four times a day. She's the first patient in Australia to try a new procedure that might one day put all that to an end.
Doctors from the Prince of Wales Hospital and the University of New South Wales extracted insulin-producing cells from a donated pancreas.
They were put in tiny capsules, coated in seaweed and injected into Stewart's abdomen.
"They have pores on the surface of these capsules which allow nutrients to come in but are too small to allow the immune cells, which destroy the tissue, to enter," says Professor Bernie Tuch from the Diabetes Transplant Unit.
As these immune cells can't penetrate the seaweed coating, the patient doesn't have to take anti-rejection drugs.
It will be months at least before doctors know if the treatment has been successful, but in the best case scenario people like Stewart may be able to come off insulin and stay off it.
The idea of a transplant to cure type one diabetes isn't new.
Several patients were implanted with pig cells in an experimental trial in 1994, but xenotransplantation is now banned in both New Zealand and in Australia.
The new trial - being a human to human transplant - has no such ethical dilemma. But doctors are urging caution and say while promising, the results could take years to emerge.
