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Inspiration for new diabetes treatments comes from unlikely sources
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Studying snail venom and pig tissues is leading researchers to new technologies that may someday treat diabetes.
University of Utah researchers are focusing on cone snail venom, which consists of insulin, in order to study it’s fast-acting benefits.
“People think it’s easy to make drugs,” Helena Safavi, PhD, professor of biology at the University of Utah, said in a press release. “But where do you start? You have to have some kind of idea of what a drug should look like, what kind of properties the drug should have, so it’s very difficult to design novel drugs. That’s why we use the snail venom system.”
The cone snail secretes insulin into the water in order to paralyze the nearby fish, sending them into hypoglycemic sedation. Once a fish is stunned, the snail engulfs and consumes it. The predatory function of the insulin requires it to be fast acting.
Human insulin naturally sticks together in order to be stored in the pancreas, but the insulin of the cone snail does not, which allows it to be absorbed faster. By studying the snail insulin, researchers hope to find ways to improve the fast-acting insulin currently available to treat diabetes.
Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are attempting to wrap pancreatic islets from pigs and mice in nano-thin bilayers of protective material in the hopes of developing a way to treat type 1 diabetes.
These tissues, called stealth insulin producers, have five bilayers of biomimetic material about 30 nanometers thick.
In a previous study, researchers found that nano-coated mouse islets survived and functioned for up to 40 days in diabetic mice without immune systems.
In the current study, researchers will examine these stealth insulin producers, from both pigs and mice, in diabetic mice with intact immune systems.
While coated islets have been tested before with limited success, the team hopes that the thinner layer will still dampen the immune response while allowing passage of nutrients and oxygen. The option of pig islets for humans may also provide a larger supply when compared with limited amounts of human islets.