This year Breakthrough T1D Play passed a big milestone: Our community has now raised more than $7M for life-changing type 1 diabetes (T1D) research and advocacy since the program’s inception in 2019!
Thank you to everybody who held a charity stream, made a donation, played games with us, chatted on Twitch and Discord, and helped spread the word about our mission. We appreciate each and every one of you.
Before we take off for the holidays, let’s take a look back at Breakthrough T1D Play’s Top Ten Greatest Hits of 2025 (in no particular order).
#1 — Barbie with Type 1 Diabetes
She’s a Barbie girl in a T1D world! This summer Breakthrough T1D and Mattel teamed up on the first-ever Barbie with diabetes, providing amazing visibility and representation for kids (and grown-up kids) living with type 1.
This special Barbie has an insulin pump, a CGM, and a polka-dot dress that incorporates both the official color (blue) and official shape (circle) of T1D. The doll flew off store shelves when she debuted in July, but is now back in stock at Target, Walmart, and other retailers.
Community member Arielehm paid homage to T1D Barbie during National Diabetes Awareness Month (NDAM) with some very convincing cosplay!
#2 — New Dynamic Streaming Toolkit
#3 — Level One — A Game to Master Diabetes
Sam Glassenberg is a game developer and T1D dad who serves as an advisor to Breakthrough T1D Play. When his daughter was diagnosed at age five, Sam and his wife got a frantic crash course in glucodynamics that he wouldn’t wish on any parent. So Sam developed Level One, a mobile game that turns diabetes management into a game!
Available for free on the App Store and Google Play—and already downloaded by more than 20K players—Level One is an incredible learning tool for parents, caretakers, healthcare providers, and kids that’s actually fun to play. See it in action in our T1D Tuesday stream with Sam.
#4 — Raid for Research 2025
Each February, we assemble a crew of streamers for Raid for Research, a one-day streaming marathon that gets bigger and better every year. With the help of our sponsor Abbott, maker of the FreeStyle Libre 2 and 3 systems, this year’s crew raised more than $52K in twenty-two hours—and our minds were blown! 🤯
From speedrunning to juggling to choking down a chicken durian smoothie (we appreciate you, TheOnlyRyann!), our Raid for Research streamers showed up in a big way this year. Can we continue the streak for an even bigger event in 2026? We’ll find out soon, because next year’s Raid for Research is only two months away.
#5 — Breakthrough T1D Play’s New YouTube Channel
When we started this program (as JDRF Game2Give) in 2019, we went all in on Twitch with charity streams, community tournaments, T1D-related educational content, and more. We saved much of this content as Twitch highlights over the years, but this spring Twitch announced they were cutting back on storage space and we were wayyyy over the limit.
The silver lining is that we’d been wanting to move over to YouTube channel for a long time. So we backed up six years of content and we’re gradually bringing some of our favorite T1D Tuesdays, Dev Diaries, and game streams to the Breakthrough T1D Play YouTube channel. Please subscribe and check out the VODs you haven’t seen yet—the algorithm is hungry!
#6 — Magic: The Gathering Mania
We dipped our toes into the Magic: The Gathering pond last year with Vintage vs. Type 1, an event dreamed up by MTG community fixture Brian David-Marshall (aka BDM), who lives with type 1 and also lost his brother to the disease. After raising $15K in 2024, we set our sights higher this year, starting with a special Dev Diaries stream in May with the creator of Magic himself, Richard Garfield.
When this year’s Vintage vs. Type 1 event happened in October, it did not disappoint. In just under a week, six of BDM’s friends from the Magic community raised almost $30K while they competed against each other for the most Vintage Cube wins. The event also included an auction of rare Magic items, tokens for free MGTO drafts and avatars donated by Daybreak Games, and in-person fundraising at CubeCon in Wisconsin.
If you’re a Magic: The Gathering fan, keep an eye out for the return of Vintage vs. Type 1 in 2026. Based on the success of this year’s fundraiser, we’re planning to open it up to more players next year.
#7 — Breakthrough T1D Brave Build Challenge
#8 — Diabeatdown 4
#9 — Children’s Congress & Superhero Rufus in Breakthrough T1D World
Our Roblox game, Breakthrough T1D World, keeps getting bigger and better! This year’s updates included an expansion of the Washington DC area in honor of Breakthrough T1D’s bi-annual Children’s Congress, which had 170 delegates ages 4–17 visiting lawmakers to lobby for polices and funding to help people living with type 1 diabetes. In the game’s Children’s Congress side quest, you can visit the Capitol, attend a press conference, testify before Congress, run an obstacle course, and more.
Also new this year is a fun Superhero Rufus mode that lets you run faster and glide through the air as you explore everything Breakthrough T1D World has to offer. This new mode was added in honor of Children with Diabetes’ Friends for Life conference, where the game was on display.
Breakthrough T1D World on Roblox also has a treasure hunt, minigames, a racetrack, and a management sim that puts you in charge of your very own virtual Breakthrough T1D Walk. Plus, it’s family-friendly and totally free.
#10 — Major Advancements in Cell Therapies
Breakthrough T1D Play may be all fun and games, but there’s an important mission behind our shenanigans: to eradicate type 1 diabetes once and for all. This year we got even closer.
Supported by Breakthrough T1D’s investments and advocacy, at least a dozen functional cell therapy cures are being clinically tested on humans right now, with two in particular showing very promising results in 2025:
- All twelve of the patients who received transplanted islet cells from Vertex Pharmaceuticals are making their own insulin, with ten of them achieving insulin independence. This treatment requires immunosuppression (so the immune system won’t attack the transplanted cells), but it could still be life-changing for people who struggle with blood sugar management.
- Another trial from Sana Biopharmaceuticals involves transplanting cells that stimulate insulin production and hide from the immune system. The first person to receive this experimental treatment has now been making their own insulin for more than six months, without the need for immunosuppressants.
