u/Puzzled-Telephone-60

Any expats here? For years my husband and I both have desired to live internationally long-term. I’m American and spent several years pre-dx living in China, so I know what it’s like to live in a different culture with different systems and ways things work, different climate, learning and speaking a different language with little use of my native tongue… but I don’t know what it’s like to manage the cortisol demand of all those unknowns. When I imagine it in hindsight it seems like it’d be really difficult! I did already have T1D at that point, but the difficulties of management were more about learning the glycemic load of the food there and stockpiling supplies. Int’l travel is one thing, but I’m wondering if anyone has experience living somewhere with low cultural proximity to your home culture.

Hey everyone,

As someone with APS-2 I’ve been tracking recent breakthroughs in immunology and wanted to start a conversation about what they actually mean for the future of Addison’s.

For a long time, the roadblock to an actual cure hasn't been growing new cells (stem cell tech is already there). The roadblock was that our autoimmunity would immediately hunt down and destroy any new cells we implanted. We needed an immune "cloaking system" to make transplants viable.

Two recent massive milestones suggest science is finally figuring out how to build that cloak:

The 2025 Nobel Prize: Awarded to the discoverers of Regulatory T cells (Tregs)—the immune system's natural "peacekeepers." The research proved we can retrain the immune system to tolerate specific tissues rather than just shutting down the whole immune system with steroids.

The Eledon Trials: Eledon recently achieved 100% insulin independence in a Type 1 Diabetes pilot trial. They paired an islet cell transplant with a new drug (tegoprubart) that successfully blocked the attacking cells while keeping the patient's native "peacekeeper" Tregs alive to chemically camouflage and protect the new tissue.

Why this matters for us with PAI:
Even though our adrenal cortexes are destroyed, this "cloak" means that if we can successfully implant lab-grown adrenal stem cells in the future, we finally have a proven mechanism to stop the body from instantly killing them off.

We are likely looking at a 5–10 year horizon for a widespread T1DM cure, and a 10–15+ year horizon for this to adapt to other endocrine tissues like ours.
Does seeing clinical proof of an autoimmune "cloak" give you genuine hope for a future cure, or does the timeline feel too far out to get excited about? I’m 34 so there’s a good chance this happens in my lifetime, but personally the happiness I feel over this more for my children and future generations.