With over 2.9 million people suffering from diabetes in the UK an advance in treatment is needed urgently. A daily pill that could treat or even cure diabetes is a step closer after scientists in Washington University conducted tests on mice with diabetes. The findings were very encouraging but there is still lots of developing and further studies to carry out before they are closer to having the ground breaking medication.
The study found that injecting a naturally occurring chemical called NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide) into mice with type 2 diabetes improved their disease. In female mice fed a high-fat diet, NMN restored the mices glucose tolerance to normal. The effects in male mice fed a high-fat diet were not as great. It restored their glucose levels but did not change their insulin intolerance levels as it did in the females.
This early stage research highlights the importance of NMN in this specific process and proposes a partial biological explanation for how it works. This will help guide future research to fully explore the processes involved
Although the results are very promising, the scientists have acknowledged further research and testing is required to check whether the positive effects can replicated humans, and that administering this chemical will be safe and have a similar beneficial effect. If this research is successful, it is still likely to take many years to develop from this initial research in animals to a pill for type 2 diabetes in humans.
Small animal studies are a useful first step to investigate disease processes that also occur in humans as mice and men have similar biological processes. However, there are still important differences between the species, so the research conducted on the mice is not entirely representative of what would happen in humans. To reciprocate the findings from mice to humans, strict controlled human research trials will have to be conducted, and only after any major safety concerns are ruled out in animals can human testing begin.
