Diabetes and insulin: better way than injection for diabetics to administer insulin
January 12, 2014 Leave a comment
Diabetes and insulin: better way than injection for diabetics to administer insulin
Jan 11th 2014 | From the print edition
FACED with death, most people will do almost anything to stay alive. That is why many millions around the world either stick needles in themselves at frequent intervals to inject a hormone called insulin, or wear a device called an insulin pump that does the same thing automatically through a catheter that penetrates their skin. A body’s failure to make insulin, which regulates how cells burn glucose, their primary fuel, causes the symptoms doctors call type-1 diabetes. Until the discovery of insulin, in the 1920s, this form of diabetes was a death sentence.In principle, it might be possible for diabetics to take their insulin by mouth, as the hormone can be absorbed into the body through the walls of the small intestine. Unfortunately, insulin molecules cannot survive the acidity of the stomach, an organ they need to traverse to arrive in the intestine. But, as he describes in a paper in Biomacromolecules, Sanyog Jain of the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, in Ajitgarh, India, thinks he has found a way around the problem—or, rather, through it.
Dr Jain’s idea is to wrap the insulin in oily droplets called liposomes, which will protect it from the stomach’s acid. He is not the first person to think of this, but previous attempts failed because packaging insulin in this way also stops the small intestine absorbing it. The really clever bit of Dr Jain’s thinking, therefore, is to coat the liposomes in their own layer of wrapping, made of folic acid, a molecule that helps pull oily molecules across the membranes of the cells that line the small intestine.
And it works—at least, in rodents. Indeed, insulin levels of diabetic rats fed Dr Jain’s liposomes remained high for longer than those of similar rats given the hormone by injection. It is early days, of course, and rats and humans are not the same. But this is an encouraging finding. If clinical trials in people show something similar, the world’s diabetics may no longer face the scourge of frequent injections or the irritation and risk of infection of an insulin pump.
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