This is more than just interesting.
It may come too late for me but I suspect that by 2050, the great fear of diabetes Type 2 and the real damage it causes, will long have been forgotten. But there will still be a challenge in not allowing the solution to excuse and encourage a life-style which is essentially unhealthy. It should not become like a glutton inducing vomiting so that he can eat some more!!
A new paper in Nature
Jae Myoung Suh, Johan W. Jonker, Maryam Ahmadian, Regina Goetz, Denise Lackey, Olivia Osborn, Zhifeng Huang, Weilin Liu, Eiji Yoshihara, Theo H. van Dijk, Rick Havinga, Weiwei Fan, Yun-Qiang Yin, Ruth T. Yu, Christopher Liddle, Annette R. Atkins, Jerrold M. Olefsky, Moosa Mohammadi, Michael Downes, Ronald M. Evans. Endocrinization of FGF1 produces a neomorphic and potent insulin sensitizer. Nature, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nature13540
From the Press Release:
One injection stops diabetes in its tracks
In mice with diet-induced diabetes—the equivalent of type 2 diabetes in humans—a single injection of the protein FGF1 is enough to restore blood sugar levels to a healthy range for more than two days. The discovery by Salk scientists, published today in the journal Nature, could lead to a new generation of safer, more effective diabetes drugs.
The team found that sustained treatment with the protein doesn’t merely keep blood sugar under control, but also reverses insulin insensitivity, the underlying physiological cause of diabetes. Equally exciting, the newly developed treatment doesn’t result in side effects common to most current diabetes treatments. …….
Diabetes drugs currently on the market aim to boost insulin levels and reverse insulin resistance by changing expression levels of genes to lower glucose levels in the blood. But drugs, such as Byetta, which increase the body’s production of insulin, can cause glucose levels to dip too low and lead to life-threatening hypoglycemia, as well as other side effects.
In 2012, Evans and his colleagues discovered that a long-ignored growth factor had a hidden function: it helps the body respond to insulin. Unexpectedly, mice lacking the growth factor, called FGF1, quickly develop diabetes when placed on a high-fat diet, a finding suggesting that FGF1 played a key role in managing blood glucose levels. This led the researchers to wonder whether providing extra FGF1 to diabetic mice could affect symptoms of the disease.
Evans’ team injected doses of FGF1 into obese mice with diabetes to assess the protein’s potential impact on metabolism. Researchers were stunned by what happened: they found that with a single dose, blood sugar levels quickly dropped to normal levels in all the diabetic mice.
“Many previous studies that injected FGF1 showed no effect on healthy mice,” says Michael Downes, a senior staff scientist and co-corresponding author of the new work. “However, when we injected it into a diabetic mouse, we saw a dramatic improvement in glucose.”
The researchers found that the FGF1 treatment had a number of advantages over the diabetes drug Actos, which is associated with side effects ranging from unwanted weight gain to dangerous heart and liver problems. Importantly, FGF1—even at high doses—did not trigger these side effects or cause glucose levels to drop to dangerously low levels, a risk factor associated with many glucose-lowering agents. Instead, the injections restored the body’s own ability to naturally regulate insulin and blood sugar levels, keeping glucose amounts within a safe range—effectively reversing the core symptoms of diabetes. ………
I suspect a golden age of medical science is underway and it will be unrecognisable – for us – by 2050.
The k2p blog 