Scientists at two of the top U.S. universities say they have made significant advances in their quest to find a more efficient treatment for diabetes and eventually a cure. According to the International Diabetes Federation, the disease affects more than 370 million people worldwide. VOA's George Putic reports.
Excess sugar, or glucose, in your blood is not good. But a healthy body regulates it through insulin, produced in the organ called the pancreas. If the body fails to do that, either because of genetics, or an unhealthy lifestyle, diabetics have to adopt a grueling routine of constant monitoring of blood sugar and injecting insulin for the rest of their lives.
Both insulin monitors and delivery devices called insulin pumps, are available, but so far, creating an automatic injector that does not require monitoring has proved to be a difficult problem.
After working on it for almost 20 years, scientists at Harvard University say they may be close to solving it.
Frank Doyle of Harvard University says: "In essence, we use a patient model, a computational model, a mathematical model, to forecast into the future. So we get a sense of how past insulin affects future glucose, how the past trajectory of glucose is going to play out for the next hour or two."
Scientists say automatic insulin pumps should be on the market within five years.
Finding a cure for diabetes would be even better and these mice may hold the key.
In the type of diabetes caused by genetic disposition, the human immune system kills pancreas cells that produce insulin. A jello-like substance engineered in the laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shields those cells from the attack.
Daniel Anderson of Massachusetts Inst of Technology says: "We can take these human islets from stem cells and actually cure these diabetic mice for months. We have also shown that in primates we can put these little balls of new material in the abdominal space of primates and see that they don't form scar tissue which is an important step towards thinking of using them in people."
Scientists are optimistic that one way or another, or maybe with a combination of approaches, they will bring relief to diabetes sufferers within a few years. (GEORGE PUTIC, VOANEWS, WASHINGTON)
