Diabetes: New treatment to prevent complications from the immune response
Type 2 diabetes can be a 'devastating diagnosis' says expert
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Diabetes causes a large number of complications throughout the body.
It has been linked with slower healing of wounds, kidney disease and high blood pressure.
New treatment may reduce the complications of not only type two diabetes, but also type one.
The results were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Disruptions to the immune system can occur as a result of diabetes.
This can cause inflammation that damages organs such as the kidneys and makes them more susceptible to disease.
A treatment that blocks diabetes from activating the immune system while still leaving the immune system intact could reduce the complications faced by diabetics.
Researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine may have found a drug to achieve this.
A protein called “RAGE” is linked to the inflammatory signals that damage the heart and kidneys.
A new compound, named “RAGE229”, blocks this signalling pathways.
It has shown positive short- and long-term results in both mice and isolated human cells.
“Our results establish the molecular backbone of RAGE229 as the foundation for a new approach that targets intracellular RAGE actions to counter diabetic tissue damage,” said Dr Ann Marie Schmidt, professor of Endocrinology and lead author.
“With further refinements, RAGE229 and its descendants have great potential to fill gaps in treatment, including that most current drugs work only against type 2 diabetes.”
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The researchers examined several aspects of how diabetes affects health in mice and whether RAGE229 could prevent them.
One experiment induced heart attacks in mice with and without the compound.
The mice without the treatment had a greater amount of heart muscle dying as a result of the blocked artery.
In a longer-term study, the mice showed a stronger ability to heal from wounds after 21 days of treatment with the compound.
The research team screened a library of 59,000 compounds to find one that best interfered with RAGE.
Dr Schmidt said: “The RAGE229 used in our study will not be the version recommended should it move forward into human clinical trials.
“We continue to aggressively synthesise and test new compounds and chemical modifications to RAGE229.
“These new molecules promise to yield a final drug candidate with optimal potency in the foreseeable future.”
Diabetes is a condition in which the body is no longer able to synthesise or utilise the hormone insulin, which controls blood sugar levels.
It can result from an autoimmune disorder that destroys the tissue in the pancreas that produces insulin, known as type 1 diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes results from the body developing a resistance to insulin, requiring larger amounts than the pancreas is able to produce.
The difference in causes means that they sometimes require separate methods of treatment.
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