A team of chemists, polymer scientists and drug delivery specialists at Zhejiang University, in collaboration with a pair of colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have developed a type of insulin “intelligent” which, when tested in mouse and pig models, successfully regulates blood glucose levels for up to a week after a single injection.
The results of research were published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Smart insulin: here's what the research says
The group of students explained how they created their smart insulin, how it works and how it worked when administered to diabetic mice and pigs.
Type I diabetes is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin. Treatment for people with the disease includes a modified diet and regular insulin injections. Many diabetics must inject themselves more than once a day, a painful and difficult regimen: The skin at the injection sites tends to harden over time, making it difficult to insert a needle.
Because of these difficulties, medical researchers have continued to search for new treatment options. In this new study, the research team developed a type of smart insulin that reacts with certain agents in the body, allowing automatic control of blood glucose levels over a long period of time.
The new smart insulin is a modified form of the type of insulin already in use: the researchers added gluconic acid, which when injected into the body turns into a complex by binding to chemicals in the blood.
Such complexes cause insulin to become trapped within a natural polymer, which results in alterations in signaling. Different amounts of insulin are released depending on blood glucose levels. This, the research team found, allows more insulin to be automatically released into the blood when it is needed (for example after a meal) and less when it is not.
The researchers tested their modified smart insulin on three pigs and five mice, all engineered to have diabetes. Two of the minipigs received a high dose, while the third received a low dose.
By monitoring the laboratory animals over the following weeks, the research team found that the miniature pig that had been given the low dose showed more stable glucose regulation than the other mini pigs that had been given the high dose and also compared to mini pigs given daily injections of standard insulin.
The researchers said their findings are promising for a new type of treatment for patients with type I diabetes. They will continue to test their smart insulin on animals and, if all continues to go well, move on to human trials.
#Smart #insulin #regulates #blood #sugar #week