Home-based continuous glucose monitoring for diabetics up to now has had to trade ease of use, low cost, and portability for a somewhat lower sensitivity—and thus accuracy—compared to similar systems in clinics or hospitals. A team of researchers has now developed a biosensor for such monitors that involves "zero-dimensional" quantum dots (QDs) and gold nanospheres (AuNSs), and no longer has to compromise on accuracy.
A paper describing the biosensor design and its enhanced performance appeared in the journal Nano Research on Nov. 9, 2022.
For the millions of people living with diabetes, insulin is a life-saving drug. Unlike many other medicines, though, insulin cannot be easily delivered by swallowing a pill—it needs to be injected under the skin with a syringe or pump. Researchers have been making steps toward an insulin pill, and now, a team reports in ACS Nano that they've delivered insulin to the colons of rats using an orally administered tablet powered by chemical "micromotors."
Patients with diabetes have trouble regulating their blood glucose levels because they produce little or no insulin. Synthetic insulin has existed for over a hundred years, but it is often administered with an injection or an implanted pump. People affected by diabetes often take insulin multiple times per day, so frequent injections can be painful, and as a result, some patients do not take the recommended dose at the correct times.
An international team of scientists has found a way to regenerate kidneys damaged by disease, restoring function and preventing kidney failure. The discovery could drastically improve treatments for complications stemming from diabetes and other diseases.
Diabetes causes many problems in the body, but one of the most prevalent is kidney disease. Extended periods of elevated blood sugar can damage nephrons, the tiny filtering units in the kidneys, which can lead to kidney dysfunction and eventually failure.
For the new study, researchers in Singapore and Germany investigated a potential culprit – a protein known as interleukin-11 (IL-11), which has been implicated in causing scarring to other organs in response to damage.
On closer inspection in tests in mice, the team found that as kidneys sustain damage, the cells lining their tiny inner tubes release IL-11, which slows cell growth and sets off a molecular cascade of inflammation and scarring. But when IL-11 is blocked, using either mice genetically engineered to lack it or giving mice an antibody that blocks it, this process is prevented, and healthy cells can regenerate to reverse existing damage.
Apple reportedly made a big breakthrough on a secret non-invasive blood glucose monitor project that originally was part of a 'fake' startup
Lakshmi Varanasi
Feb 22, 2023, 2:41 PM https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-r ... tor-2023-2
Apple had a breakthrough on a revolutionary blood glucose monitor, according to Bloomberg.
The project began under Steve Jobs, and has been underway for more than a decade.
The project is now part of Apple's XDG, but operated for some time under a startup called Avolonte.
Apple reportedly had a breakthrough on a secret project that could launch the company into a major force in the healthcare industry, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
It's a monitor that can continually measure a person's blood glucose levels without as much as a skin prick, according to Bloomberg. Instead, Apple's monitor will use optical absorption spectroscopy, a measurement process that relies on wavelengths of light to ultimately determine glucose levels, Bloomberg said.
The secret endeavor — called E5 — has been under wraps for the past several years, according to Bloomberg.
Drugmaker Eli Lilly caps the cost of insulin at $35 a month, bringing relief for millions
The move puts the drugmaker in line with a popular provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the medication’s cost for seniors on Medicare.
Eli Lilly will cap the out-of-pocket cost of its insulin at $35 a month, the drugmaker said Wednesday. The move, experts say, could prompt other insulin makers in the U.S. to follow suit.
The change, which Eli Lilly said takes effect immediately, puts the drugmaker in line with a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act, which last month imposed a $35 monthly cap on the out-of-pocket cost of insulin for seniors enrolled in Medicare.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, one out of every three adults in the United States has prediabetes, a condition marked by elevated blood sugar levels that could lead to the development of type 2 diabetes. The good news is that if it is detected early, prediabetes can be reversed through lifestyle changes such as improved diet and exercise. The bad news? Eight out of 10 Americans with prediabetes don't know that they have it, putting them at increased risk of developing diabetes as well as disease complications that include heart disease, kidney failure and vision loss.
Current screening methods typically involve a visit to a health care facility for laboratory testing and/or the use of a portable glucometer for at-home testing, meaning access and cost may be barriers to more widespread screening. But researchers at the University of Washington may have found the sweet spot when it comes to increasing early detection of prediabetes. The team has developed GlucoScreen, a new system that leverages the capacitive touch sensing capabilities of any smartphone to measure blood glucose levels without the need for a separate reader.
The researchers describe GlucoScreen in a new paper published March 28 in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.
The researchers' results suggest GlucoScreen's accuracy is comparable to that of standard glucometer testing. The team found the system to be accurate at the crucial threshold between a normal blood glucose level, at or below 99 mg/dL, and prediabetes, defined as a blood glucose level between 100 and 125 mg/dL. This approach could make glucose testing less costly and more accessible—particularly for one-time screening of a large population.
Patients with type 1 diabetes live with a constant risk of hyper- or hypoglycemia. Precisely controlled insulin release could help to improve regulation of their blood sugar levels. Reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, a research team has now introduced a novel insulin formulation that can be switched on by glucose: Lipid nanoparticle carriers release more or less insulin depending on the blood sugar level.
Insulin levels in plasma are primarily regulated by β-cells in the pancreas and reflect fluctuations in the blood sugar level. Patients with type 1 diabetes can produce very little or no insulin and require several daily injections of a fast-acting insulin as well as one or two injections of a long-acting insulin to keep their blood sugar at a normal level.
Alternatively, they wear an insulin pump that provides continuous infusion. The insulin formulations cannot react to changes in the blood sugar level and thus do not allow for the precise regulation of blood sugar. If an insulin overdose is administered, a meal is missed, or too little carbohydrate consumed before strenuous physical activity, there is increased risk of acute, life-threatening hypoglycemia.
Insulin formulations that respond to glucose, mimicking the function of β-cells, could improve insulin therapy. Various approaches with insulin "carriers" made of polymers with incorporated glucose oxidase as a glucose detector suffer from two problems: The polymer carriers are not of uniform molecular weight and glucose oxidase is toxic if released into the body.
There's that COVID vaccine formula in everything else as expected. Well that is presuming it hasn't been in vaccines for years since some are funky themselves when you get them in their effects.
Study Links Poor Diet to 14 Million Cases of Type 2 Diabetes Globally April 17 , 2023
Introduction:
(Eurekalert) A research model of dietary intake in 184 countries, developed by researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, estimates that poor diet contributed to over 14.1 million cases of type 2 diabetes in 2018, representing over 70% of new diagnoses globally. The analysis, which looked at data from 1990 and 2018, provides valuable insight into which dietary factors are driving type 2 diabetes burden by world region. The study was published April 17 in the journal Nature Medicine.
Of the 11 dietary factors considered, three had an outsized contribution to the rising global incidence of type 2 diabetes: Insufficient intake of whole grains, excesses of refined rice and wheat, and the overconsumption of processed meat. Factors such as drinking too much fruit juice and not eating enough non-starchy vegetables, nuts, or seeds, had less of an impact on new cases of the disease.
“Our study suggests poor carbohydrate quality is a leading driver of diet-attributable type 2 diabetes globally, and with important variation by nation and over time,” says senior author Dariush Mozaffarian, Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition and dean for policy at the Friedman School. “These new findings reveal critical areas for national and global focus to improve nutrition and reduce devastating burdens of diabetes.”
Type 2 diabetes is characterized by the resistance of the body’s cells to insulin. Of the 184 countries included in the Nature Medicine study, all saw an increase in type 2 diabetes cases between 1990 and 2018, representing a growing burden on individuals, families, and healthcare systems.
The research team based their model on information from the Global Dietary Database, along with population demographics from multiple sources, global type 2 diabetes incidence estimates, and data on how food choices impact people living with obesity and type 2 diabetes from multiple published papers.
Type 1 diabetics must constantly control their blood glucose with insulin. It’s a Goldilocks-type situation: administer too much insulin, and they risk low blood glucose (hypoglycemia), while too little can lead to high blood glucose (hyperglycemia). Researchers have developed a self-adjusting nanoparticle-based insulin formulation that may go some way towards improving blood glucose control.
Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system attacks the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas so that little or no insulin is produced. The exact cause of T1D is unknown but is thought to be due to genetics and some viruses.
Treatment of T1D requires taking fast-acting insulin, either by intermittent, manual injections or continuously via an insulin pump, and regularly monitoring blood glucose levels to avoid hypo- and hyperglycemia, both of which can have life-threatening consequences. Long-acting insulin might also be used to provide a slow, steady release of insulin.
New insulin capsule could be game-changing for diabetics
By Paul McClure
April 19, 2023
Australian scientists have designed a new capsule that could mean diabetics might one day swallow their insulin instead of injecting it. The design also has potential uses for delivering other protein drugs, such as antibiotics and cancer treatments.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system attacks the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, causing little to no insulin to be secreted. Type 1 diabetics – and some type 2 diabetics – therefore have to inject themselves with insulin several times a day.
Many diabetics take two types of insulin: fast-acting and slow-acting. After it’s injected, fast-acting insulin is absorbed quickly and is used to control blood glucose levels during meals and snacks and to correct high blood glucose. Meanwhile, long-acting insulin is usually administered once a day. It’s absorbed slowly and provides a ‘background’ level of insulin to help control blood glucose over the day.
Approximately 40% of persons with diabetes develop chronic kidney disease, leading to successive deterioration and even the complete loss of kidney function. Until now, it has not been possible to predict whether and at what rate the kidney disease will progress. Early detection is essential to delay or avoid kidney failure requiring dialysis.
As part of an international research project led by MedUni Vienna, a tool was developed that allows estimates up to five years in advance, thus allowing for timely preventive measures. The results of the study were recently published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
For their research, the team led by Rainer Oberbauer, Head of the Division of Nephrology and Dialysis at MedUni Vienna's Department of Medicine III, and Mariella Gregorich from MedUni Vienna's Center for Medical Data Science drew on data from major international studies. This made it possible to include 13 routinely-collected baseline values from 4,637 18- to 75-year-olds with type 2 diabetes with slightly to moderately impaired kidney function.
In addition to the most important value for assessing kidney function (estimated glomerular filtration rate, eGFR), age, gender, body mass index, smoking behavior, hemoglobin and cholesterol levels as well as medication intake were selected as predictors. On this basis, the research team developed a predictive model based on tested statistical methods, which is already being prepared for clinical use.
"The strength of our study compared to previous research on the topic lies not only in the refined methodology, but also in the large amount of data. This allows us to attain a high level of confidence in our findings," says first author Mariella Gregorich. "Accordingly, the prediction tool proves to be reliable and able to predict a decline in kidney function based on eGFR for up to five years after baseline."
However, the study has also revealed that the individual course depends on other, still unknown factors.
For the well over 700 million people around the globe living with type 1 diabetes, getting a host immune system to tolerate the presence of implanted insulin-secreting cells could be life-changing.
Rice University bioengineer Omid Veiseh and collaborators identified new biomaterial formulations that could help turn the page on type 1 diabetes treatment, opening the door to a more sustainable, long-term, self-regulating way to handle the disease.
To do so, they developed a new screening technique that involves tagging each biomaterial formulation in a library of hundreds with a unique "barcode" before implanting them in live subjects.
According to the study in Nature Biomedical Engineering, using one of the alginate formulations to encapsulate human insulin-secreting islet cells provided long-term blood sugar level control in diabetic mice. Catheters coated with two other high-performing materials did not clog up.
"This work was motivated by a major unmet need," said Veiseh, a Rice assistant professor of bioengineering and Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas scholar. "In type 1 diabetes patients, the body's immune system attacks the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas. As those cells are killed off, the patient loses the ability to regulate their blood glucose."
A small group of patients with type 2 diabetes significantly improved their long-term blood sugar levels when treated with high-dose tadalafil, a medication used to treat erectile dysfunction. The result from the University of Gothenburg pilot study is striking, but repetition in a larger study and over a longer period is needed.
Tadalafil is one of the active pharmaceutical substances known as PDE5 (phosphodiesterase type 5) inhibitors, a group that also includes the well-known drug Viagra. PDE5 inhibitors are used to treat impotence or erectile dysfunction (ED).
"Self-medication with PDE5 inhibitors must never take place because, at worst, it can be life-threatening in combination with certain other drugs. These medicines are available on prescription only, and must always be prescribed by the attending physician," says Per-Anders Jansson, professor at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg.
Unlike the other three PDE5 inhibitors that are approved in Sweden, tadalafil is long-acting and can be prescribed as a daily dose.
Canadian researchers have identified a new role for vitamin K and gamma-carboxylation in beta cells and their potentially protective role in diabetes, achieving a first in 15 years of basic research.
The discovery by scientists at Université de Montréal and its affiliated Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM) is a welcome advance in the understanding of the mechanisms underlying diabetes, a disease that affects one in 11 people worldwide and has no cure.
Published May 11 in Cell Reports, the study explains, at least in part, how vitamin K helps prevent diabetes, and could lead to new therapeutic applications for type 2 diabetes.
Vitamin K is a micronutrient known for its role in blood clotting, in particular in gamma-carboxylation, an enzymatic reaction essential to the process. It has been suspected for several years that this vitamin, and thus gamma-carboxylation, may have other functions as well.
Several studies suggest a link between a reduced intake of vitamin K and an increased risk of diabetes. However, the biological mechanisms by which vitamin K protects against diabetes remained a mystery until now.
Enzymes in large quantities
In their study, UdeM associate research professor of medicine Mathieu Ferron and his team at the IRCM were first able to determine that the enzymes involved in gamma-carboxylation and therefore in the use of vitamin K were present in large quantities in pancreatic beta cells, the very cells that produce the precious insulin that controls blood sugar levels.
Stem cells from the human stomach can be converted into cells that secrete insulin in response to rising blood sugar levels, offering a promising approach to treating diabetes, according to a preclinical study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine.
In the study, which appeared in Nature Cell Biology, the researchers showed that they could take stem cells obtained from human stomach tissue and reprogram them directly—with strikingly high efficiency—into cells that closely resemble pancreatic insulin-secreting cells known as beta cells. Transplants of small groups of these cells reversed disease signs in a mouse model of diabetes.
"This is a proof-of-concept study that gives us a solid foundation for developing a treatment, based on patients' own cells, for type 1 diabetes and severe type 2 diabetes," said study senior author Dr. Joe Zhou, a professor of regenerative medicine and a member of the Hartman Institute for Therapeutic Organ Regeneration at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Research in Sweden led by the University of Uppsala has looked into using mesenchymal stromal cells to halt the progress of newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes. In the paper, "Umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stromal cells preserve endogenous insulin production in type 1 diabetes: a Phase I/II randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial," published in the journal Diabetologia, researchers detail the study and results of a small sample set of 24 participants.
The researchers used Wharton's jelly-derived mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) that were not derived from the patients in the study (allogeneic).
Animal cells share some qualities with plant cells, but one key feature ours lack is a rigid cell wall. While this provides structure for plants, it’s also something scientists are increasingly looking at for use in new materials, cellulose technology and, now, insulin delivery.
Led by Henry Daniell from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Dental Medicine, researchers have created a promising plant-based insulin, containing the three peptides that occur naturally in insulin, which can also be ingested orally.
Just as important as the genetic material on the inside, the plant cell walls are key to the drug's efficacy. Their sturdiness shields the insulin from upper digestive tract acids and enzymes, until the drug reaches the microbes in the gut, which work to release the insulin. From here, the insulin travels via the gut-liver axis to reach its destination.
Researchers have combined a drug that’s normally used to treat cancer with a naturally derived anti-inflammatory to stimulate pancreatic stem cells to grow into insulin-producing cells. The study’s findings could one day lead to an alternative way of restoring insulin production in people with type 1 diabetes.
In type 1 diabetics, the pancreas’ beta cells are damaged or destroyed by the body’s immune system, producing little or no insulin. Much research has been undertaken to develop treatments to regenerate beta cells, including converting stem cells from elsewhere in the body into insulin-producing cells. According to the International Diabetes Federation, in 2022 there were 8.75 million people in the world living with type 1 diabetes.
The pancreas consists of exocrine and endocrine cells. Endocrine cells are the ones that secrete hormones, including insulin, and exocrine cells produce enzymes that are secreted into the small intestine and help to digest food. Ductal cells are exocrine cells that form the lining of the tubes (ducts) that deliver pancreatic enzymes. Previous studies have suggested that ductal progenitor cells, descendants of stem cells, can differentiate into insulin-producing beta cells.
New Study Confirms Plant-Based Diet Can Promote Type 2 Diabetes Remission by Megan Edwards
July 13, 2023
Introduction:
(Forks Over Knives) Adopting a whole-food, plant-based diet can help people with Type 2 diabetes achieve remission or significantly decrease their reliance on medication, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. Researchers analyzed the health records of 59 Type 2 diabetes patients who were treated at a cardiac wellness clinic where they received support in implementing a WFPB diet as part of a lifestyle treatment plan.
The shift in diet garnered several significant results: 22 of the patients (37%) achieved total remission, while the number of patients who needed to use glucose-lowering medications dropped from 40 to 29. Additionally, the number of insulin prescriptions within the group fell from 4 to 1 after the changes in diet were made.
“The two key characteristics of WFPB diets that support Type 2 diabetes remission are lower total energy and lower total fat, which lead to reduced energy intake,” says Micaela Karlsen, PhD, senior director of research for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and a lead researcher on the study.
The concept of eating low energy density foods—that is, foods with a low calorie count—is a popular and proven method for long-term weight loss. This approach allows a person to eat a relatively large volume of food without gaining weight because the ingredients aren’t highly caloric and are often filled with hunger-busting properties such as fiber. In a 2020 statement, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine elaborated on how this technique can support Type 2 diabetes remission by saying that “the three factors of decreasing fat, increasing fruits and vegetables, and increasing water content have been shown to decrease caloric content,” which supports healthy blood sugar levels. Eating a WFPB diet naturally includes many low energy density foods, making it a prime lifestyle choice for people battling diabetes.
This new study adds to a growing body of research that supports using a WFPB diet to prevent, halt, or even reverse the negative health effects of Type 2 diabetes.