Indian Scientists Make Significant Diabetes Breakthrough

A group of Indian scientists recently announced that they had made a significant breakthrough that would allow diabetics to inject themselves only once a month or less, rather than every day. Scientists at the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi said that a two-year trial on mice, rats and rabbits of a drug, which slowly releases insulin into the body over weeks or even months, was successful.

Their report, which was published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the scientists said that 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. Anoop Mishra, Director of the diabetes department at Fortis Hospitals in New Delhi, and Chairman of the Diabetes Foundation (India), said: “I think this is a very exciting development.” He added that 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. It is still in the early stages of development,” he further said of the prototype drug.

Meanwhile, Avadhesha Surolia, Director of the National Institute of Immunology and one of the paper’s authors, said that the technology had been licensed to Life Science Pharmaceuticals in Connecticut. According to him, the agreement was “one of the biggest licensing deals from any academic institution in India.” More than 220 million people worldwide suffer from diabetes, which kills more than one million people each year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Diabetes is affecting a growing number of people across Asia because of a combination of modern diets, increasingly urban living and genetics. Some diabetics have to inject insulin every few hours and must carefully watch their diet and blood sugar levels because their bodies are unable to break down glucose in the blood.