Discovery of compound may open new road to diabetes treatment
The discovery of an inhibitor of the Insulin Degrading Enzyme (IDE), a protein responsible for the susceptibility of diabetes because it destroys insulin in the body, may lead to new treatment approaches for diabetes. In collaboration with the discoverers of the inhibitor, David Liu and Alan Saghatelian, Stony Brook Medicine scientist Markus Seeliger, PhD, and colleagues nationally, demonstrated the efficacy of the compound in a research paper in the early online edition of Nature.
More than 20 million people live with type II diabetes in the United States, a disease in which the body cannot make sufficient amounts of the hormone insulin. IDE removes insulin from the blood. To date, diabetes treatment strategies are based on patients either injecting insulin, taking medicine to make their body more sensitive to insulin, or taking other drugs to stimulate insulin secretion. In the paper, "Anti-diabetic action of insulin-degrading enzyme inhibitors mediated by multiple hormones," the authors reveal results that point to a potential new approach -- regulating the degradation of insulin in the blood.
