In nature, creatures use camouflage to elude predators all the time. Now, a University of Miami researcher hopes the clever art of concealment also can help her defeat one of the world’s most challenging medical conditions.

Cherie Stabler won a $1.5 million Type 1 Diabetes Pathfinder Award from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in September for her research into improving outcomes for clinical islet transplantation, currently considered one of the best hopes for curing diabetes.

Her idea is to encapsulate transplant cells with “incredibly benign and very biocompatible materials” to mask them from immune-system attackers. “It’s called immunocamouflage,” says Stabler, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and director of the tissue engineering program at the Miller School of Medicine’s Diabetes Research Institute.

Although the method is not new, Stabler’s strategy differs significantly from those of the past in that she’s attempting to advance coating applications from the micron to the nanoscale.

“It’s like shrinking the barrier from the size of a football field to a couple of blades of grass,” she explains. “The barrier can’t be too large because the cells will starve. It has to be porous enough to let nutrients in but at the same time thick enough to provide sufficient camouflage.”

For inspiration, Stabler and her interdisciplinary team studied everything from computer chips to car-cleaning products.

“We’re looking at what other industries are doing to create incredibly thin layers and trying to figure out how we can translate their approaches to a living cell,” says Stabler, who plans to have preliminary coatings ready to test by May.