New screening platform can be used to discover more effective drugs for type 1 diabetes
With nearly 2 million Americans battling type 1 diabetes, it is no surprise that clinical therapies for the disease are constantly evolving and improving. In type 1 diabetes mellitus, the body s immune system attacks and destroys insulin-producing β-cells. As a result, people living with type 1 diabetes lose insulin secretion and encounter difficulty regulating glucose levels especially after meals.
Drugs developed to proliferate β-cells often are inefficient and have off-target effects that can dysregulate other cell types and pancreatic hormone production. To address these issues, researchers at Brigham and Women s Hospital and the Broad Institute teamed up to design next-generation β-cell-targeting proliferators: zinc-binding prodrugs (ZnPD). To achieve this, the researchers engineered a new screening platform, the Disque Platform, to better represent β-cells in the lab. Utilizing the D
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With nearly 2 million Americans battling type 1 diabetes, it is no surprise that clinical therapies for the disease are constantly evolving and improving. In type 1 diabetes mellitus, the body s immune system attacks and destroys insulin-producing β-cells. As a result, people living with type 1 diabetes lose insulin secretion and encounter difficulty regulating glucose levels especially after meals. Drugs developed to proliferate β-cells often are inefficient and have off-target effects that can dysregulate other cell types and pancreatic hormone production. To address these issues, researchers at Brigham and Women s Hospital and the Broad Institute teamed up to design next-generation β-cell-targeting proliferators: zinc-binding prodrugs (ZnPD). To achieve this, the researchers engineered a new screening platform, the Disque Platform, to better represent β-cells in the lab. Utilizing the Disque Platform, researchers identified a ZnPD drug which exhibited a 2.4-fold in