Bioscience News - GEG Tech top picks

Scientists have shown that misfolded islet amyloid polypeptide aggregates are transmissible like prions and can trigger the development of type 2 diabetes pathogenesis in the recipient

Federal regulators have approved a first-of-a-kind "artificial pancreas," a device that can help some diabetes patients manage their disease by constantly monitoring their blood sugar and delivering insulin as needed.

French pharmaceutical group Sanofi is joining with Verily Life Sciences, a unit of Google parent Alphabet, to create a joint venture called Onduo to research diabetes treatments.

Correctly diagnosing which type of diabete a patient has is crucial, and in a small minority of cases the wrong diagnosis can be fatal. But in an age of growing obesity in the western world, diagnosis is becoming increasingly difficult for doctors.

According to diabetes expert Dr Richard Oram, from the University of Exeter Medical School, clinical diagnosis is currently based almost entirely on age at diagnosis and whether a patient is obese.

Oram's team has come up with a new, relatively inexpensive, genetic test for the disease, which he thinks will help doctors.

FDA-approved artemisinins, which have been used for decades to treat malaria, transform glucagon-producing alpha cells in the pancreas into insulin producing cells, researchers report.

University of Utah researchers have found that the structure of an insulin molecule produced by predatory cone snails may be an improvement over current fast-acting therapeutic insulin. The finding suggests that the cone snail insulin, produced by the snails to stun their prey, could begin working in as few as five minutes, compared with 15 minutes for the fastest-acting insulin currently available. Biologist Helena Safavi, co-author on a paper describing the cone snail insulin published September 12 in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, says that studying complex venom cocktails can open doors to new drug discoveries.