Novel Drugs for the Treatment
of Diabetes
A new family of possible drugs to treat type 2
diabetes are being developed from D-Xylose, a
sugar found in fruits.
A new approach to providing medication for adult
diabetics (type 2 diabetes) that is not dependent
on insulin has been developed by a doctoral student
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For his
work, which he did for his Ph.D. thesis in pharmacology,
Arie Gruzman was awarded one of this year's Kaye
Innovation Awards at the Hebrew University.
Unlike other conventional drugs
that require active insulin-producing cells in
the pancreas and that often fail to overcome a
companion problem of insulin resistance, the novel
compounds developed by Gruzman and his supervisor,
Prof. Shlomo Sasson, in collaboration with Prof.
Yehoshua Katzhendler and Prof. Erol Cerasi of
the Hebrew University School of Pharmacy and the
Faculty of Medicine, are unique in that they can
reduce hyperglycemia (above-normal levels of glucose
in the blood) by increasing the rate of glucose
disposal in the blood in a non-insulin-dependent
manner.
The new drugs, when fully developed,
may provide a treatment to diabetic patients who
have especially serious problems of insufficient
natural insulin production and/or resistance to
insulin.
A patent for these new compounds
-- which, perhaps surprisingly, are based on D-Xylose,
a sugar found in fruits -- has been obtained through
the Hebrew University's Yissum Research Development
Company. The laboratory work was supported financially
by the Deutsch Foundation of Venezuela and the
Nophar Program of the Israel Ministry of Trade
and Industry.
Source: Hebrew University of Jerusalem
06/05/2003
===========================
DID YOU KNOW: .
After 6 years of follow-up, researchers found
that watching TV was associated with both becoming
obese and developing diabetes. After adjusting
for confounding factors, each additional 2 hours
per day of TV watching was associated with a 23%
increase in obesity and a 14% increase in type
2 diabetes.
