Type 2 Diabetes Management

Type 2 Diabetes Management with a New Drug

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Lu Young RN

Still in the early research phase is type 2 diabetes management with a new drug. This new medication works without causing weight gain, fluid retention, or loss of bone density of diabetic medications and has not shown any of the other side effects, but further testing is needed.

JUPITER — Scientists at Scripps Florida say they’ve found a way to treat diabetes without the side effects that have hindered sales of two other once-popular drugs.

In a study published this week in the journal Nature, scientists from the Scripps Research Institute’s Jupiter labs and from Harvard University’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say a new class of anti-diabetic compound can treat the fast-growing disease.

The discovery is important because two other drugs – Avandia and Actos – have taken hits from warnings about side effects. Some 24 million Americans suffer from diabetes, the American Diabetes Association says, and that number is expected to grow throughout the world.

“Metabolic disease is a high-risk, high-reward play,” Tartaglia said. “There is a lot of risk in going after a target like this with a history of many failures and issues.”

Griffin sees no side effects from the compound he has been studying.

“This could represent a significantly safer class of insulin sensitizers,” Griffin said.

Tartaglia said he talked to a dozen pharmaceutical companies about the potential for another PPAR-gamma drug.

“Half of them are just afraid of the word PPAR-gamma,” he said.

But the other half were open to a treatment that would go after the protein. Adipothermics hopes to begin testing Scripps’ compound in humans in two years.

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Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are also involved in testing and development of this new diabetes medication.

The most effective of these candidates, labeled SR1664, was tested in cultured cells and insulin-resistant mice in the Spiegelman laboratory. It was found to have potent anti-diabetic properties but caused no fluid retention or weight gain. When compared with Avandia, SR1664 showed equivalent anti-diabetic effects, confirming the scientists’ hypothesis that diabetes can be treated by drugs that target PPAR-gamma but don’t agonize the molecule.

These studies illustrate that the development of entirely new classes of PPAR-gamma-targeted drugs is feasible, concludes Spiegelman, who is the Stanley J. Korsmeyer Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues.

The co-first authors of the paper are Jang Hyun Choi and Alexander Banks in the Spiegelman lab. Support for the research came from the National Institutes of Health.

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Stay tuned in the near future for further testing of type 2 diabetes management with a new drug.