Stomaching diabetes
A radical technique for treating diabetes could recruit cells in the gut to make insulin
SAN DIEGO — If your pancreas fails you, go with your gut.
Inserting a gene into gut cells in mice enabled those cells to take over the pancreas’s job, producing insulin after meals, according to unpublished research announced June 18 in San Diego at the Biotechnology Industry Organization International Convention. The work may offer a novel way to treat diabetes.
“This is the first time that we’ve engineered a tissue that is not the pancreas to manufacture insulin” in animals, says researcher Anthony Cheung, a molecular biologist and cofounder of enGene, a biotechnology company based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“It’s going to be very beneficial to patients,” comments Christopher Rhodes, research director of the KovlerDiabetesCenter at the University of Chicago, who enGene asked to critique the research. “It’s a very promising approach.” Cheung says that he and his colleagues hope to begin safety trials in people by 2010.