Chinese researchers may have found the key to an oral drug that could treat both diabetes and type 2.
they are concentrating on a compound called BOC5 by Ming-Wei Wang, MD, PhD and colleagues at the National Center for Drug Screening and Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China.
BOC5 is not powerful enough to become a diabetes or weight loss drug. But Wang and colleagues suggest that the daughter compounds could join the last generation of diabetes drugs, called "Incretin Mimetic".
The first infretin approved by the FDA was BYETTA. A second drug, with the generic Liraglutide name, is in clinical trials.
These drugs imitate a intestinal peptide, peptide similar to glucagon, or GLP-1.
Drugs help people with type 2 diabetes normalize their blood sugar, lose weight, and maybe even earn new cells to do insulin.
The problem is that they are great molecules. This means that they can not be used as oral drugs, but need to be given by injection.
This is what makes the BOC5 different. It is a small molecule and therefore promises to follow a new family of more powerful oral drugs for diabetes.
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To find BOC5, Wang and colleagues displayed 48,160 compounds for GLP-1 activity. They found two.
Eventually, these compounds led them to the molecule now called BOC5.
Scientists tested the BOC5 drugs in a mice strain created with a defect that makes them eat too much. This excess, along with insulin resistance, defective insulin production, causes diabetic rats.
Mice given Boc5 began to eat less; And daily doses reduced blood sugar levels from animals to normal. In addition, when the GLP-1 activity was blocked, these BOC5 effects were also blocked.
"Although the observed effects point to a potential anti-diabetic utility, anti-obesity, a practical drug will probably require greater power," Wang and colleagues complete.
But, they add, "the results reported here ... have the potential to spawn a new class of drugs orally available for the treatment of metabolic diseases." / p>
Wang and colleagues report Its discoveries in the January 3 edition of 3 years of process of the National Academy of Sciences.
