Researchers find fungus helps lower blood glucose
Researchers find fungus helps lower blood glucose
Preliminary studies show dramatic reduction
A promising oral alternative to insulin is on the lab bench at Merck Research Laboratory in Rahway, NJ.
And what is even more exciting, one expert says, is the screening technique Merck researchers used to screen more than 50,000 compounds to determine if any of them had glucose-lowering properties.
Compound L-783,281 is derived from a fungus found growing on another plant near Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"It is exciting," says Bei Zhang, PhD, senior research fellow at Merck. "We are really working very hard to come up with new diabetes drugs that are different from the ones that are currently available. It’s too early to project when, and even if, this medication will become available."
The research article published in the May issue of Science magazine says Zhang and her team identified pseudomassaria as the first small molecule with a capability of functioning as an insulin sensitizer.
It was selected as an insulin receptor rather than for insulin-like growth factor properties.
In vitro and in vivo studies confirmed the fungus’ anti-diabetic properties as an oral agent, which makes it a promising alternative to injected insulin somewhere several years from now.
Studies with L-783,281 in diabetic mice showed single oral doses produced a 50% correction of hyperglycemia, Zhang says. Longer term treatment of up to 15 days in mice did not affect food intake, organ weights, blood chemistry, or liver function.
Beyond the potential for L-783,281 as an oral diabetic agent in itself, Zhang says, the discovery "shows it is possible to selectively activate insulin receptors, so it will help us find other possible anti-diabetic compounds."
Zhang declined to say if Merck researchers have identified other promising compounds.
In a targeted approach to drug development, researchers used a cell-based assay to screen the compounds for actions that mimic insulin.
Using Chinese hamster ovary cells that overexpress the human insulin receptors, the researchers incubated intact cells and assayed them. L-783,281 showed it was reproductively active in the test. By comparison, a closely related natural product analog, L-767,827 (hinulliquinone) was 100 times less active in the assay, Zhang wrote in Science.
"This is very, very, very preliminary, but it is also very promising," says Robert Ratner, MD, medical director of Medlantic Clinical Research Center in Washington, DC.
"Is it safe? We don’t know. Is it ready for human trial? Not for many, many years — five years or more," he says.
Ratner says what he finds most exciting about the find is the assay method by which the 50,000 compounds were screened. "The promise is really in the technique for screening new compounds."
[Contact Bei Zhang at (908) 423-6492.]
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