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Near-Complete Cure For Diabetes In Two Years?
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Dec 16, 2006 07:21 PM
from the medical-miracle dept.
from the medical-miracle dept.
resistant writes "Researchers at a Toronto hospital have stumbled upon a dramatic treatment for mouse diabetes, with large implications for the treatment of diabetes in humans. From the article: 'The islet inflammation cleared up and the diabetes was gone. Some have remained in that state for as long as four months, with just one injection... They also discovered that their treatments curbed the insulin resistance that is the hallmark of Type 2 diabetes, and that insulin resistance is a major factor in Type 1 diabetes, suggesting the two illnesses are quite similar.'"
Update: 12/17 03:46 GMT by KD : resistant adds that the Cell Journal article is posted as a PDF as well as in plain text.
Update: 12/17 03:46 GMT by KD : resistant adds that the Cell Journal article is posted as a PDF as well as in plain text.
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Researchers May Have Found Cause of Type 2 Diabetes 181 comments
ozmanjusri writes "Scientists at Sydney's Garvan Institute have identified an enzyme called PKCepsilon as the active agent that blocks the production of insulin in diabetics. Insulin injections and implants try to control levels but do not address the reasons why insulin production is failing. This discovery may allow pharmaceutical companies to develop a drug to block the enzyme, allowing cells in the pancreas to function normally, though the team's leader, Trevor Biden, says 'What we've identified is a target that we can now latch onto to get therapy, but the journey from target to tablet of course is a long one ... It's probably going to take another 10 years at least to get something that's effective in humans.'"
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A treatment for diabetes? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A treatment for diabetes? (Score:5, Funny)
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Bad Humor is expected (Score:5, Funny)
We all know that slashdot is full of bad humor, and if we want good humor, we have to look somewhere else. [icecreamusa.com]
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Re:A treatment for diabetes? (Score:5, Funny)
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Hm (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot Title: Near-Complete Cure For Diabetes in Two Years?
Yet again, it's always the mice (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yet again, it's always the mice (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cell.com/content/article/abstract?uid=
the link to the PDF for the entire article is to the right of the page
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Re:Yet again, it's always the mice (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because using Google is so damn hard. Enter "Cell Journal" into Google. First link. The Article [cell.com] is available.
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Re:Yet again, it's always the mice (Score:5, Insightful)
Specific animals are usually chosen for studies because certain biological systems function in a very similar way to the relevant human biological system. Heck, plenty of drugs that work on humans work on cats and dogs and probably lots of mammals. Certain NSAIDs, antibiotics, steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, benzodiazepenes (anti-anxiety drugs like valium), and some chemotherapy agents developed for use in humans, just to name a few drugs commonly used with cats and dogs off the top of my head.
Your suggestion then that the results of animal trials bear "no relation" to how they will perform in humans is simply nonsensical. Many drugs may seem to be active in animals, but in humans turn out to be no better than other drugs on the market in terms of efficacy and worse in terms of side effects, which commonly leads to dropping them from commercialization. Differential comparisons of drug efficacy in animal models aren't necessarily useful to determining which drugs will be the most effective in humans, and side effects are not always equivalent, but that's not the point of animal trials - the point is to establish that the basic biological mechanism works in vivo and to get a vague concept of possible safe dosing in an animal model before moving to initial human safety tests.
I fail to see how you and the other animal rights loonies can have such a poor grasp of how scientific research works and yet feel qualified to comment so authoritatively on it.
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This couldn't come soon enough (Score:4, Funny)
Inflamation (Score:5, Interesting)
Inflammation and evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
Bring on the weight loss (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting thing is the simplicity (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading the actual article (Score:4, Interesting)
The newspaper article is a not quite accurate either, although it has less hyperbole than the parent. What the study actually says is that it appears that the sensory nervous system is playing a role in the development and progression of diabetes. That is the "blockbuster", since it was thought to be an autoimmune disease.
If verified, it provides yet another avenue of investigation into diabetes control and possibly cure, but this is a first study. A lot of work needs to be done to go between this and a standard treatment.
Important? Yes. Break out the champagne and declare diabetes is cured? No.
Re:Mouse diabetes? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Mouse diabetes? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Type 1 PETA members probably already dead (Score:5, Informative)
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At least it's not always 20 years away! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Please...why do they report prematurely? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Please...why do they report prematurely? (Score:5, Interesting)
It, along with Nature and Science, is one of the big three, the most respected
journals in most sciences. This does not guarantee against fraud but this is
not science by press release either. The other thing is that they talk of human
trials. Just to get approved for those you need buttload of evidence and it is
reviewed very thoroughly and it will be tested by many people, not just study
authors. Everything about this work seems proper, though once again there is no
real guarantee against fraud.
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Re:Please...why do they report prematurely? (Score:5, Interesting)
For me this is great news, my mother has been taking insulin shots for nearly 30 years. Recently animal based insulin products were removed from use, at least from the pool of what she has available. This wasn't some nefarious scheme of drug companies. It is because doctors perceived the new insulins to be better and easier to acquire. What is has led to is pure annoyance and even life threatening situations for many diabetics. Instead of two shots a days she was now in a regimen of 4 or more, using two different types; fast acting and slow acting. Even with multiple blood tests per day, watching what she was eating, she still went into conditions near death when her blood sugar either dropped into the teens or went over 500.
On a side note, bless my mother, she cannot recall my phone number all the time. She was alone at home as my father was away on a trip with friends and she had a bad reaction. She knew she was in trouble and managed to get some food down but passed out. When she awoke, very groggy and barely concious she managed to dial 911. The paradmedics could not enter the house as it was locked and they are not permitted to break down doors. She actually recalled my phone number and 911 contacted me. Needless to say I made a 10 minute trip in record time. Her blood sugar was in the low 20s when the Paramedics tested it. They would not even more her until they could get her stable. She was barely there. They actually had an ambulance on its way. Obviously she recovered.
Now because of this issue it was decided to put her on an insulin pump. A couple of people at work are also on the pump now, all for the same reason. It has become near impossible for some of them to regulate their blood sugar levels with the synthetics. So I look at a discovery like this as a near miracle. Hopefully the tests will prove out in a year or two. This type of discovery only happens because there are still people, working for either government, universities, and corporations, who defy common wisdom or by sheer luck stumble upon a whole new method.
While I don't know how much study was being done in this direction I can only hope it spurs others to investigate similar treatments for health problems considered to be nearly known is cause and scope. Its this openess to ideas that may just save us all one day.
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Re:Diabetics, please do not count on this (Score:4, Interesting)
My son is a Type I diabetic and last month he had to do a year based timeline in math to learn about positive/negative integers. He did his on the discoveries related to diabetes and in particular insulin.
Lots of progress has been made over the years, and in particular the last 3 decades. The type of insulin he uses is just slightly older than he is.
The media is great at making everything seem like it is the next big discovery(witness the title of this article), but this is a pretty significant change in the understanding of the causes and possible cures of diabetes.
The injected substance is a natural substance already approved for injection for other medical purposes, and for this particular purpose (affecting nerve cells), although prior to this research no one had associated nerve cells with the onset of diabetes.
This research is as signifcant as it gets. Up there with the discovery of anti-biotics, and it represents a wave of change in how several diseases will be treated in the coming decade.
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Re:Diabetics, please do not count on this (Score:5, Interesting)
I am (or was) a type 2 diabetic myself, so I know about getting my hopes up. A lot of strange things are happening in diabetes research lately, though, and it's starting to look like nobody really understood how it worked. Maybe they still don't, but they're at least starting to get a clue.
As for myself, I finally gave up on dieting last summer and opted for weight loss surgery. For some reason that nobody really understands yet, some forms of weight loss surgery cure type 2 diabetes about 75% of the time. Those were good enough odds for me, and I got lucky: it worked. I've been off of all the diabetes medications since the day I got out of the hospital. My blood sugar, while not quite down in the normal range yet, is lower than it was before then surgery when I was taking the medications. And losing 75 pounds probably didn't hurt either. :-) This isn't for everyone, but at least there are starting to be options.
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Re:"suggesting the two illnesses are quite similar (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA - part of the big point here is that their research shows that this type of treatment cures BOTH types, indicating that contrary to what is believed, BOTH types have a similar cause, not just similar symptoms.
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