What are islets?
Islets (“eye-lets”) are groups of cells. Their mid-19th century discoverer, Paul Langerhans, called them islets because they look like small islands in a sea of other tissue. In the healthy pancreas, islets contain four types of cells essential to metabolism and the management of glucose levels in the blood. Though a normal adult pancreas contains approximately a million islets, they account for only 2-3% of the pancreas’s tissue.
