Scientists search for new diabetes therapy

British medical scientists say they are searching for a new class of drugs to treat type 2 diabetes.

The University of Oxford researchers, funded by Britain’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, say they are using a new technology to create a cheap and efficient method of drug discovery that will allow small academic labs to search a large database of drugs to find treatments for diabetes and many other diseases.

They have used the new method to identify a small molecule that they are using to understand how insulin is secreted in response to increases in blood sugar.

A lot of diseases are caused by problems with important proteins within cells, said Grant Churchill, who is leading the research. We need to find small molecules that change the function of these proteins both to discover how they work and in addition because these small molecules may also work as treatments for disease. The approach we have developed allows us to do this much more quickly and cheaply than many of the current methods. Ultimately this will speed up the process of getting better treatments into the clinic for patients.

The research is reported in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.