Maynooth University team makes diabetes treatment breakthrough

Researchers at Maynooth University have come up with a new way to tackle type II diabetes using a compound that mimics the anti-diabetic effects of vigorous exercise.

They have also discovered these compounds reduce the weight increase sometimes seen with the current best treatments available to keep Type II under control.

"There is a lot more work to do, but this looks very promising," said Dr John Stephens who heads the department of chemistry.

“If it is as clean as it looks, it will be a great improvement on what is currently available on the market.”

The incidence of diabetes in Ireland and abroad has soared over the past decade, with type II patients here numbering at least 200,000 and 370 million worldwide, Dr Stephens said.

The condition occurs when the body becomes unable to take sugar out of the bloodstream and use it up as energy.

Lack of exercise and obesity are key risks, and there are serious health repercussions if it goes untreated, he said. “Diabetes is very serious; you can go blind, you risk amputations, it is a very serious condition.”

They body uses insulin to encourage cells to take sugar as glucose out of the bloodstream. The more one exercises, the more glucose that will be taken up.

The new family of drugs discovered by the Maynooth group does the same thing - but in a different way. It works 1,000 times better than the current top diabetes drug Metformin, and does not seem to cause that drug’s side-effects, Dr Stephens said.

“Our compound is nothing like the drugs used at the moment so it is a potent new class of anti-diabetic agent.” he said.

The team of scientists involved has spent five years developing the new compounds and has already used them to control Type II in mouse models.

“Our compounds are independent of the insulin pathway. The fact that it is independent of insulin means it could serve as an alternative to insulin, but there is much more work to do,” he said.

“We know quite a lot about the compounds, but there is still a long way to go in pre-clinical and toxicological work before we can run human trials. That is some years off – at least three or four,” he said.

The research team includes Prof John Findlay and Dr Darren Martin of Maynooth University, and Dr Gemma Kinsella, formerly of Maynooth and now at of Dublin Institute of Technology.

They also have collaborators in Trinity College Dublin and the University of Leeds.

The team will publish its results in the Journal of Molecular Endocrinology.