By Michael Hill
Correspondent
Millions of Americans spend billions of dollars on drugs every year to treat the symptoms of their type 2 diabetes, the disease that causes the body to not produce enough insulin to control blood sugar or degrades the body’s ability to use insulin.
Rutgers Pharmacologist Victor Shengkan Jin says excess fat in the cells of the liver is a major cause of insulin resistance.
Now, he and his graduate students say they’ve found a way to attack the root cause of type 2 in laboratory mice.
“It’s amazing,” he said.
Dr. Jin says he reformulated the FDA-approved drug niclosamide — used to eliminate intestinal parasites. He injected the modified medication into mice fed a high-fat diet and mice with hereditary type 2. He says it burned up the excess fat and allowed the mice’s cells to control insulin, slowing down the hereditary type 2.
“If you treat these mice with our drug you do not get much body weight gain and most importantly when you see the liver there’s no fat accumulation in that. Essentially that proves it can prevent high-fat diet or junk food induced diabetes,” Jin said.
The research results holds so much promise because so many Americans have type 2 diabetes and the CDC predicts many more will develop it.
“I think that’s fantastic,” said Casey George.
George from California is one of the type 2 sufferers who read about Dr. Jin’s research and emailed him to volunteer for the human clinical trials likely to start next year.
“I want to do anything I can to help further his cause because he is the first person that I’ve actually seen who’s going after what causes it,” George said.
The American Diabetes Association says it’s really nice work, a novel and promising mechanism. And it says it could be important if proven safe and effective in humans.
Often the best option for those who are obese with type 2 is gastric bypass surgery.
Dr. Jin hopes this will be make such surgery a thing of the past.
“We hope this drug, number one could provide another weaponry to fight this disease. Number two, we hope this drug is more effective because it’s targeting the cause. More effective or even provide the, I can not say cure, I want to say its more effective and healthy patients type 2 diabetes” he said.
The research results went online in the journal Nature Medicine this week.