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Biotech / Medical : Merck -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Racso who wrote (1207)	5/7/1999 8:47:00 AM
From: William Partmann	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580

African fungus could leads to diabetes pill-study By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) - A compound purified from a fungus found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo may help lead to the development of a pill that could treat diabetes, researchers said on Thursday. The compound seems to act like injected insulin, at least in mice, the researchers, led by a team at Merck Research Laboratories (MRK - news) in Rahway, New Jersey, said. Writing in the journal Science, they said their compound showed it is possible to develop pills that can replace insulin injections for millions of diabetics. About 175 million people worldwide, nearly 16 million of them in the United States, suffer from diabetes. It can lead to blindness, heart disease, limb loss and kidney disease. There are two types. Type-I or juvenile diabetes is caused by the destruction of insulin-secreting cells in the pancreas. Type-II, or non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM), affects many more people and is caused when the body becomes resistant to insulin's effects. In both types, cells are unable to absorb enough glucose, a sugar, to work properly. Insulin is key to this and when there is either not enough, or the cells are not responding to it, the system goes haywire. Millions of diabetics have to inject insulin daily to control their blood sugar levels. There are also drugs that help enhance the effects of insulin. Insulin is a large molecule that is destroyed in the stomach, so it must be injected. Scientists have been searching for a substitute that can be swallowed. Bei Zhang and colleagues in the United States, Spain and Sweden screened more than 50,000 substances collected around the world by Merck to see which acted the most like insulin in a laboratory dish. They sought one that was small and easily absorbable into the bloodstream. They settled on one called L-783,281, originally taken from a fungus on a leaf collected in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. Zhang's team noted that no one really yet understands what, on the molecular level, causes type-II diabetes. But they noted that in some studies, people with diabetes have fewer insulin receptors -- which are chemical doorways that insulin uses to get into cells. Some patients also have suppression of some enzymes that use the insulin receptors. ''Thus, a subset of NIDDM patients have clear defects in insulin signaling that, in theory, might be overcome by treatment aimed at augmenting insulin receptor function,'' they wrote in their report. That is what they believe L-783,281 does. They tested their compound in two different strains of mouse bred to have the equivalent of human diabetes. A single dose lowered blood sugar, and over a week daily doses also significantly lowered blood sugar, they wrote. It did not seem to harm the mice. ''Long-term treatment (up to 15 days) with therapeutic doses of L-783,281 did not affect food intake, body weight, organ weights or blood chemistry,'' they wrote. Although it is a long way from testing something so experimental in mice to testing it in humans, the researchers think their experiments show there are potential compounds that might one day replace injected insulin, at least for some people. Merck, like many other companies, has spent years collecting samples of plants and animals from around the world for use in testing as drugs. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------