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Bioinformatics Summer Internship 2024 With Hands-On-Training + Project / Dissertation - 30 Days, 3 Months & 6 Months Duration

Diabetes is a metabolic disorder attributable to high blood glucose/ blood sugar, arising either due to inadequate insulin production or because the body’s cells do not properly respond to the insulin being produced. When compared to Type II, the incidence of Type I Diabetes in relatively lesser. When it comes to Type II, it requires daily insulin injections which another nuisance and utterly inconvenient.

The drug glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP1) is used in these injections to treat Type II Diabetes for its ability to regulate the islet hormones and induce satiety. Regardless of this, the molecule has one major shortcoming- its short half-life, meaning it does not stay inside our body as long as we would like it to and hence requiring regular repeated doses.

However, a team of researchers from the Duke University are now trying to extend this molecules half-life by exploring an idea- to combine this molecule with another material forming an amalgamation of sorts that tends to stay longer in our system, therefore not necessitating repeated injections.

They have combined GLP1 with a biopolymer molecule which is a liquid at room temperatures, making it easier to inject into the body, and turns to a gel-like substance inside

the body due to heat, which facilitates its slow release in the body’s environment. This mixture was then injected into both mice and rhesus monkeys. This new GLP1 now controlled the blood sugar level for 10 and 17 days in mice and monkeys respectively.
Since the metabolism of humans is much slower than that in monkeys, theoretically, it could last longer than 17 days, hopefully a whole month.

“Preclinical data presents compelling evidence that this construct would require no more than two injections a month for humans, and possibly as few as one per month, especially given the dose-stacking potential of this system,” state the researchers in the paper.

It definitely sounds promising doesn’t it ?

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