New Treatment to Be Introduced by Researches That Could Give Weeks of Glucose Control For Type 2 Diabetes Patients

To control their blood sugar levels, type 2 diabetes patients constantly require relying on medication, but it is a tricky condition to handle, specifically if you require daily insulin shots.
Researchers have been working on a latest method for delivering diabetes drugs to make them last longer in the body. Now a recent research using both mice and monkeys has indicated potential for treatments that would just need a couple of injections a month.
Few of the latest-generation type 2 diabetes drugs consist of a molecule called GLP1 (glucagon-like peptide-1), which stimulates insulin production in the body just when it requires more glucose.
That sounds ideal, but regrettably, GLP1 has a actually short half-life - it breaks down in the body quickly, making it an impractical long-term treatment on its own.
By combining it with other molecules, it is possible to extend the half-life of GLP1. But that method yet merely gets us to about 3-7 days.
Right now, sufferers in the US already have few options that can be injected weekly, but scientists are searching for a way to slow down the release of the drug itself.
Now a team from Duke University has managed to combine GLP1 with a biopolymer molecule that begins out as a liquid in colder temperatures, but thickens into a gel-like substance in reaction to body heat.
This means the solution can be managed with a simple injection, but once it gets into the body, the drug is released very slowly, so it can control blood glucose levels for longer with merely one dose.
To test how their new solution would work for actual diabetes treatment, the researchers tested the drug in both mice and in rhesus monkeys - 2 species with well-established diabetes models.
They got exciting outcomes in both: in mice, the new GLP1 solution controlled glucose levels for ten days after merely one injection; in monkeys, whose metabolism is slower, the effects lasted up to seventeen days.
More than 2 weeks for one injection is better than any diabetes drug presently on the market.
The team considers that because human metabolism is even slower than in monkeys, theoretically the drug could last longer in individuals, perhaps needing just one injection a month.
"Preclinical information presents compelling proof that this construct would need no more than 2 injections a month for humans, and possibly as few as one per month, particularly given the dose-stacking potential of this system," the researchers write in the paper.
The team considers their new approach to 'trapping' GLP1 in the gel-like substance could be applied to other types of medication, too.
Of course, it is significant to note that so far the method has only worked in animal studies, and scientists will require doing more research to see how the principles would translate to human use.
GLP1-based medications are presently not the first-line treatment for people with type 2 diabetes, but this sounds like an exciting step towards making diabetes management simpler for many.
The study was released in Nature Biomedical Engineering.