Novel Therapeutics for Diabetes

Diabetes might be alleviated by eliminating old, dysfunctional cells in human fat as per a study at the University of Connecticut, published in the issue of Cell Metabolism.

The finding may lead to new treatments for Type 2 diabetes and other metabolic diseases. The body cells continually wear off older aging cells and renew themselves with newer ones.

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‘Diabetes might be alleviated by eliminating old, dysfunctional cells in human fat, leading to game-changing therapeutics for metabolic diseases.’

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However, the process sometimes goes awry and the damaged cells (called senescent cells) tend to linger. The influence of bad cells also alters the neighboring cells, thereby resulting in metabolic problems.

Among various metabolic diseases in the US, type 2 diabetes is the most common. It affects nearly 34 million people that are one out of every 10 inhabitants of the US as per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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The present study reports that diabetes with insulin resistance has a lot to do with senescent cells in the body’s fat. Hence, clearing away those senescent cells may help stop diabetic behavior in obese mice and thus set a game-changing treatment for diabetes.

The study tested the efficacy of a combination of experimental drugs, dasatinib and quercetin in analyzing its potential to kill the senescent cells from cultures of human fat tissue (donated by individuals with obesity who were known to have metabolic troubles).

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It was found that after treatment with dasatinib and quercetin, the harmful effects of the fat tissue were almost eliminated.

“These drugs can make human fat healthy, and that could be great. The results were very impressive and cleared the route for potential clinical trials. Although these preclinical results were very promising, large scale clinical trials are absolutely critical to examine the efficacy and safety of these drugs in humans before clinical use,” says Ming Xu, assistant professor in the UConn Center on Aging and the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences at UConn Health, led the research.

Source-Medindia