Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Nearly 30 million people in the US struggle with some type of diabetes, but a newly-developed “smart” form of insulin could make treating the condition easier by self-monitoring blood sugar levels and activating only when needed.
The self-regulating substance, which was developed by researchers from MIT and the Boston Children’s Hospital and described in a new PNAS study, would do away with the need to take repeated blood tests and injections in a single day, according to BBC News.
Instead, one dose of the smart insulin would continually cycle throughout the body and would only activate when it detected a spike in glucose levels. Studies conducted in mice demonstrate that the technology works, and scientists plan to conduct human trials in the near future.
While experts warn that it will take several years of additional testing before the substance is usable for actual patients, and even though the research took place in animals, The Verge calls the findings “pretty significant,” adding that the study marks the first time that scientists “have shown that a tweaked version of insulin can regulate itself in a living animal.”
“If the finding translates to humans, it could lower the amount of insulin injections required by people with diabetes and prevent some of the dangerous complications that injecting too much insulin can cause,” the website added. The substance could simulate the natural function of the pancreas in diabetics, allowing it to function the same way as it does in healthy people.
Glucose tells insulin, “Get to work!”
According to the BBC, the smart insulin is a chemically altered version of regular, long-acting insulin that includes an extra set of molecules which causes it to bind to proteins in the blood stream. While it is attached to those proteins, it is essentially in its “off” mode, but as a person’s blood sugar rises, it activates. Essentially, the glucose tells the insulin to get to work.
Co-author Daniel Anderson, a molecular geneticist at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, told The Verge that their work could bring them “one step closer to having insulin that behaves the way it’s supposed to,” and that binding to sugar molecules in the blood stream seemed to help the insulin work while also reducing the risk of hypoglycemia.
He also admitted that he and his colleagues are not entirely certain how the modified substance works. Even so, they were able to create molecules that could restore normal blood sugar levels in mice that had been given a glucose injection to simulate a meal. Not only did it work, but it worked more quickly than regular insulin or other types of long-acting insulin, Anderson noted.
“It’s all speculation, but you could envision a [human] clinical trial in three or four years, assuming a bunch of other things work out,” he added. The clinical approval process would take a few more years on top of that, meaning that the substance is a long way from being available to consumers. In the meantime, however, the researchers to make it even more effective.
Karen Addington, chief executive of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s (JDRF) UK chapter, told BBC News that “achieving good blood glucose control is a daily battle” for many type 1 diabetes patients, and often leads to their sugar levels rising too high or falling too low. A smart insulin would help eliminate these episodes and allow them to “achieve near perfect glucose control” with a single injection – a prospect she calls “really exciting.”
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