As a sugar-rich foodstuff, jelly is not often seen as a good thing for diabetics. But a new gel-based method for administering drugs could cut back on injections for diabetics and virtually eliminate their blood sugar highs and lows. Scientists have come up with a new gelatinous drug form that releases a slow but regular dose of an insulin-regulating hormone. In mice, it kept glucose levels down for five straight days—120 times longer than the hormone alone. And the method could be used to deliver drugs to treat cancer and other diseases as well.
Peptide drugs are an up-and-coming method used to treat a number of diseases. There are currently 40 peptide drugs on the market, and 650 more are being clinically tested, so the pharmaceutical industry is investing a lot in the future of these treatments. One peptide drug, used to treat diabetes, relies on weekly injections of tiny plastic capsules filled with the peptide that causes
insulin to be released slowly over the course of the week. This means far fewer injections than diabetics’ typical insulin regimen, but the injections are painful due to the large needles required to fit the capsules. Side effects like nausea are common. Plus the production is complicated because the drug and its capsule must be synthesized separately and then combined.
A twice-daily dose of insulin, sprayed deep in the nose for easy transit to the brain, may slow or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new pilot study. The researchers gave 104 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease or pre-Alzheimer’s cognitive impairment one of three nasal sprays for four months. One group of patients got a nasal spray with a moderate dose of insulin twice a day, one group got a higher dose, and the third got a squirt of saline solution, as a placebo. The memory, cognitive abilities, and day-to-day functioning of patients given insulin stayed constant or improved slightly—particularly for those given the moderate dose of insulin rather than the high dose—while the abilities and memory of patients given the placebo declined.
In an attempt to find a cure for type 1 diabetes, researchers are looking to an unlikely source: testicles. In a new study, researchers extracted stem cells drawn from human testes and reprogrammed them to produce insulin. When implanted into diabetic mice, the altered cells brought down the mice’s blood glucose levels, temporarily curing their diabetes.
In type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune system mistakenly destroys the pancreatic beta and alpha cells, which regulate blood glucose levels. Without the insulin created by their beta cells, diabetics experience high glucose levels that cause serious health problems.
Lead researcher G. Ian Gallicano and his colleagues took human spermatogonial stem cells–precursor cells that give rise to sperm–and reverted them to an embryonic state. Then the researchers coaxed them to develop into insulin-producing cells that resemble beta cells. Finally, they injected these pseudo-beta cells into the pancreases of mice with type 1 diabetes.
In a presentation on Sunday at the American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting, Gallicano said the graft was able to produce enough insulin to “cure” the mice of their diabetes for a week, though insulin levels were not high enough to treat humans this way.