Scientists invent daily pill to make living with diabetes much easier
Researchers in Japan say they have made significant progress towards developing a daily tablet that could replace insulin injections for diabetics.
A team at Kumamoto University has developed a small new peptide that helps insulin pass through the intestine in laboratory tests on mice.
This is a critical hurdle that has hindered previous attempts at oral insulin. In new tests, combining this peptide with a specially stabilized form of insulin reduced blood sugar levels after oral administration. Science Daily reports.
“Insulin injections remain a daily burden for many patients,” said Associate Professor Shingo Ito.
“Our peptide-based platform offers a new way to deliver insulin orally and can be applied to long-acting insulin formulations and other injectable biologics.”
Typically the digestive system destroys insulin before it can prove useful, and our intestines do not easily allow large proteins to enter the bloodstream.
That’s why many diabetics still depend on injections; it’s a daily routine that can be painful, disrupts work and family life, and increases material costs.
The Kumamoto group’s solution uses a zinc-stabilized ‘hexamer’ (six insulin molecules clustered together) packaged with a new cyclic peptide. In trials, this combination lasted long enough in the intestine to penetrate the intestinal wall to function.
This is the first step towards a pill that humans can consume. Any new drug must first demonstrate its safety, consistency and effectiveness in human trials.
Further research is needed to identify stable pill formulations of the peptide-insulin combination that work consistently.
According to the most recent data published in 2010, around 421,000 people in the UK were using insulin; this figure tripled between 1991 and 2010 due to increased diagnoses of type 2 diabetes.
Given that more than five million people in the UK are now living with diabetes, around 10% of whom have type 1 and a quarter of those with type 2 require diabetes, this number is likely to have increased.
