A group of investigators at the Mayo Clinic Florida say they have cracked open a door to a new class of diabetes drugs after solving a riddle that has perplexed investigators for more than half a century.
The researchers say that they have developed a new molecule that effectively blocks the breakdown of insulin in the body by inhibiting an enzyme responsible for degrading insulin in the system. By keeping insulin at work, the new molecules can reduce the level of glucose in the blood.
"It was very surprising that IDE inhibitors had not been developed before, particularly given IDE's special relationship with insulin, a very important hormone," said Malcolm Leissring, the study's lead researcher. And there could be more therapeutic uses for this drug class, he adds. "Insulin is involved in a surprisingly wide range of important processes, including memory and cognition, so IDE inhibitors may turn out to have multiple uses."
Investigators first set out to find IDE inhibitors back in the '50s, without any luck. And an attempt to use new screening methods to find the right molecules failed. The key to their success was finding the preferred peptide sequence and then adding a special chemical group that binds to zinc to create the compound. The end result was li1, which they describe as "a million times more potent than any previous IDE inhibitors."
- check out the Mayo Clinic's release
- here's the story from the Jacksonville Business Journal