Indian scientists yesterday said they had made a breakthrough that could lead to diabetics needing to inject themselves only once a month or less, rather than every day.
Researchers at the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi said they had successfully concluded a two-year trial on mice, rats and rabbits of a drug which slowly releases insulin into the body over weeks or even months.
Reporting in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they said a single dose of the drug — SIA-II — was able to maintain a minimum level of insulin in a rat for more than 120 days.
“I think this is a very exciting development,” Anoop Misra, director of the diabetes department at Fortis Hospitals in Delhi, and chairman of the Diabetes Foundation,” said.
Misra said once-a-week injections for diabetes were making good progress in trials but that monthly injections were pioneering territory.
“This longer control of diabetes with a single reservoir of insulin is entirely new, though one must keep in mind this has been done just in animal models,” he said.
Avadhesha Surolia, director of the National Institute of Immunology and one of the paper’s authors, told the Mint newspaper that the technology had been licensed to Life Science Pharmaceuticals in Connecticut.
Source: Oman Daily Observer