Enabled. A glucokinase (right) enhancer addresses two major defects found in diabetes.
The type II diabetes people can not properly respond to insulin and end up with too much glucose in the blood, which can damage blood vessels and other tissues. Now, a new strategy has significantly sugar levels in the blood reduces rodent, raising hopes that it could become a powerful tool for controlling diabetes.
Insulin is a hormone that transports glucose into the cells. When the pancreas makes too little insulin or the body reacts to this disease, the cells do not absorb the glucose and sugar levels in the blood rather soar. The problem is compounded by the liver trend in diabetic patients, multiplying the excess glucose. There is no perfect treatment, but most drugs tackle the problem by increasing insulin production or improve the sensitivity of cells to insulin. In severe cases, patients rely on insulin injections.
molecular pharmacologists Joseph Grippo, Joseph Grimsby, and their colleagues from Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, New Jersey, has pursued a different strategy. They focused on an enzyme called glucokinase, which regulates the two main functions that go awry in diabetic patients: insulin secretion by the pancreas and overproduction of glucose by the liver. Stimulate the activity of glucokinase, they believed, could normalize both -. Something no medicine against diabetes can be
The use of a molecular screen, Grippo and his colleagues dug a glucokinase activator on a haystack 0,000 candidate molecules. The researchers tested the activator of islet cells, pancreatic cells that secrete insulin. Medicated rat islet cells coaxed to release insulin and rat liver cells also responded; the drug blunted their tendency to release glucose.
diabetic mice given activator responded dramatically. With a single oral dose of the drug, sugar levels in the blood have dropped by half; in some cases they have fallen below normal. Injecting animals with almost same molecule that does not glucokinase had no effect, the group reports in the July 18 issue of Science .
The drug's ability to target the pancreas and liver simultaneously "is a big plus potential," said Alan Cherrington, a physiologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But, says Robert Rizza , an endocrinologist at the Mayo clinic in Rochester, New York, the novelty of the activator comes with some risk. the main concern, he and others say, is that the drug could lower the level of sugar in the blood too . Grippo believes that careful dosing would help users avoid side effects.
Related Sites diabetes
information on type II
diabetes information Centre NIH
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