Smart Insulin Patch Could Replace Painful Injections For Diabetes

Smart Insulin Patch Could Replace Painful Injections for Diabetes

Painful insulin injections could become a thing of the past for the millions of Americans who suffer from diabetes, thanks to a new invention from researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who have created the first “smart insulin patch.” Though it has thus far only been tested in an animal model, the patch has been shown to detect increases in blood sugar levels and secrete doses of insulin into the bloodstream whenever needed.
The patch – a thin square no bigger than a penny – is covered with more than one hundred tiny needles, each about the size of an eyelash. These “microneedles” are packed with microscopic storage units for insulin and glucose-sensing enzymes that rapidly release their cargo when blood sugar levels get too high.
The study found that the new, painless patch could lower blood glucose in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes for up to nine hours. More pre-clinical tests and subsequent clinical trials in humans will be required before the patch can be administered to patients, but the approach shows great promise. A paper describing the work, “Microneedle-array patches loaded with hypoxia-sensitive vesicles provide fast glucose-responsive insulin delivery,” is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We have designed a patch for diabetes that works fast, is easy to use, and is made from nontoxic, biocompatible materials,” said co-senior author Zhen Gu, PhD, a professor in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill. Gu also Continue reading

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Diabetes breakthrough: Insulin-producing cells formed using malaria drugs

Diabetes currently affects 29 million Americans. For decades, researchers have been trying to replace the insulin cells of the pancreas that are destroyed by the disease. Groundbreaking research may have found a way to genetically transform alpha cells into insulin-producing beta cells.
Diabetes ranks as the seventh leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC report that 29 million Americans currently live with the disease, and another 86 million have prediabetes.
Type 1 diabetes is characterized by the inability of the pancreas to produce insulin. More specifically, the body's own immune system stops recognizing the beta cells normally responsible for producing insulin. Instead, it attacks and destroys them.
Without insulin - which normally "tells" the body to start reducing the levels of glucose - the blood sugar cannot enter the cells, where it is normally transformed into energy. As a result, glucose gets stuck in the bloodstream, leading to diabetes.
For decades, scientists have been trying to find a way to replace these beta cells - sometimes referred to as islet cells because they are located in an endocrine area of the pancreas known as the islets of Langerhans.
Researchers have attempted to replace destroyed beta cells with new ones using stem cells and adult cells. Although the results have looked encouraging, they have yet to succeed.
Now, researchers from the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine in Austria seem to have found the missing link, giving hope of a cure for type 1 diabe Continue reading

FDA approves Medtronic's 'artificial pancreas' for diabetes

Medtronic Plc won U.S. approval on Wednesday for an "artificial pancreas" that is the first device to automatically deliver the right dose of insulin to patients with type 1 diabetes, freeing them from continually monitoring insulin levels throughout each day.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in its approval of the device, the MiniMed 670G, hailed it as a breakthrough.
The device offers type 1 diabetics "greater freedom to live their lives without having to consistently and manually monitor baseline glucose levels and administer insulin," Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's medical device division, said in a statement.
Analysts said the FDA approved the device six months sooner than expected. However, it will not be available until the spring of 2017.
The MiniMed 670G is the first device that allows a glucose sensor to communicate with an insulin pump and automatically regulate the insulin flow. The device is approved for those aged 14 and older.
The device measures glucose levels every five minutes and automatically administers insulin as needed. Patients will still need to instruct the device to deliver extra insulin for meals and notify the device when they exercise - which lowers glucose levels.
About 1.25 million American children and adults have type 1 diabetes, a condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin - a hormone needed to obtain energy from food.
Patients take insulin injections at various times of the day. But blood sugar can drop to dangerously low levels if too much insulin circulates in the bloodstream, requiring patients to fr Continue reading

The musculoskeletal effects of diabetes mellitus

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Abstract
Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a multi-system disease characterized by persistent hyperglycemia that has both acute and chronic biochemical and anatomical sequelae, with Type-2 DM representing the most common form of the disease. Neuromusculoskeletal sequelae of DM are common and the practicing chiropractor should be alert to these conditions, as some are manageable in a chiropractic office, while others are life and/or limb threatening. This paper reviews the effects of DM on the musculoskeletal system so as assist the chiropractor in making appropriate clinical decisions regarding therapy, understanding contraindications to therapy, referring patients to medical physicians when appropriate and understanding the impact that DM may have on the prognosis for their patients suffering from the myriad musculoskeletal conditions associated with this disease.
Keywords: diabetes, musculoskeletal, chiropractic
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Introduction
Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a multi-system disease characterized by persistent hyperglycemia that has both acute and chronic biochemical and anatomical sequelae. It is thought to affect almost 17 million Americans, only 11 million of whom have been diagnosed according to the American Diabetes Association.
In type 1 diabetes, a lack of insulin results in poor carbohydrate, fat, and protein metabolism. Insulin is functionally absent, typically due to immune-mediated destruction of the beta cells of the pancreas, though other etiologies of beta cell destruction have also been implicated, including drugs, chemicals, viruses, mitochondrial gene defects Continue reading

New Type of Insulin-Producing Cell Discovered

Possible new route to regenerating function lost in diabetes
In people with type I diabetes, insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas die and are not replaced. Without these cells, the body loses the ability to control blood glucose. Researchers at the University of California, Davis have now discovered a possible new route to regenerating beta cells, giving insight into the basic mechanisms behind healthy metabolism and diabetes. Eventually, such research could lead to better treatment or cures for diabetes.
“We’ve seen phenomenal advances in the management of diabetes, but we cannot cure it,” said Mark Huising, assistant professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences. “If you want to cure the disease, you have to understand how it works in the normal situation.”
Huising is senior author on a paper on the work published April 4 in the journal Cell Metabolism.
Working with both laboratory mice and human tissue, Huising is studying how the cells in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas work together to regulate blood glucose. In both mice and people, the islets contain beta cells, which detect glucose and secrete insulin, and other cell types including alpha cells that produce glucagon, a hormone that raises blood sugar. The opposite effects of insulin and glucagon enable the body to regulate blood sugars and store nutrients.
Type I diabetes is a disease with two parts. Firstly, the beta cells are killed by the body’s own immune system, and then they fail to regenerate (or those that do are killed). An eff Continue reading