C Peptides, Comments anyone? Interesting News
Comments??
New Swedish treatment to prevent diabetes complications
Agence France-Presse
Thu, Apr 02 1998
STOCKHOLM, April 2 (AFP) - Swedish researchers have discovered a new method to prevent the physiological complications of diabetes, using amino acids naturally produced by the pancreas but lacking in diabetics in connection with insulin injections.
According to researchers at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, C peptides, a protein compound consisting of a chain of amino acids, prevents the onset of complications common to diabetes sufferers.
"We have been doing experiments with C peptides for more than 10 years, and we have found that young sufferers that receive the peptides with insulin are hardly ever affected by the usual complications caused by diabetes, such as vision problems, loss of nerve sensitivity and kidney problems," said Professor John Wahren, the head of the institute's clinical physiology department.
"It was by chance, in the beginning of the 1980s, that we noticed that with young diabetics using insulin pumps, the kidneys were working overtime compared to those of healthy adolescents of the same age," according to another doctor at the institute, Bo-Lennart Johansson.
"We also found that with the same diet, the young diabetics did not have C peptides, a substance normally produced by the pancreas, in their bodies, contrary to the healthy adolescents," he said.
"So we produced synthetic C peptides with a DNA recombination technique used by the biochemistry and biotechnology laboratories at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology," Johansson added.
Following lab tests carried out on diabetics at the Karolinska Institute, Professor Johansson treated young diabetics by giving them equal amounts of synthetic peptides and insulin in their daily injections.
"The diabetics' kidney functions consequently dropped down to the level of the healthy adolescents," the doctor said. "We also noted that diabetics' skin wounds healed better when they were treated with C peptides," he added. "We also noticed an improvement of the circulatory system, and a decrease in
the loss of nerve sensitivity in the hands and feet that eventually affects diabetics as the disease progresses," he said.
"We still don't know very much about C peptides," Professor Wahren admits, "except that they give positive results for diabetics treated with insulin."
"However, we don't know exactly what purpose they serve in healthy people," he added. Research on synthetic peptides is currently underway in the laboratories of German pharmaceutical group Schwarz Pharma AG, which plans to invest one million marks in researching peptides over the next five years.
A group of doctors in Saint Louis in the United States and endocrinologists at the university clinic in Mainz, Germany "have results very close to ours", Wahren said.
In France, research on synthetic peptides is being conducted at Marseille university hospital center, under the guidance of Professor Philippe Vague. "In the beginning, people thought we were crazy," recall the two Swedes, who have now turned their research to people suffering from "Type 2" diabetes (non-insulin treated) and hope to find a cure in the near future |
