In an important breakthrough, scientists have found a potential drug target for treatment of diabetes.
With diabetes emerging as a global epidemic and around 350 million suffering from the condition, the WHO has projected that deaths due to diabetes would double by 2030 and it would be the seventh leading cause of death by then.
A team of scientists led by Satish Kumar, Chief Scientist and Group Leader at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) has genetically deleted Wdr13 gene in a mouse afflicted severely with Type 2 diabetes and demonstrated that the absence of the gene corrects the pathology of the disease.
In a previous study, the team had created a mutant mouse strain lacking Wdr13 gene and showed that the mutant mice had increased islet mass due to beta cells proliferation leading to enhanced insulin production.
In the recent study, they deleted the gene and found that it was in accordance with their hypothesis — that the destruction of beta cells in severely diabetic model would be corrected with removal of the gene. The recent work was published in the journal Diabetologia .
According to Dr. Kumar, it was found that the deletion of the gene not only increased insulin production, but also showed better glucose clearance and reduced inflammation and triglycerides — all associated with diabetes.
He said that significant reduction was noticed in the expression of genes involved in inflammation of pancreas, liver and adipose tissue.
His team is now planning to take up research on directly reducing the expression of the gene in pancreas through targeted delivery of RNAi, a molecule that inhibits gene expression. National and international patents have already been filed. The other scientists of the team include Dr.V. P. Singh and Dr. Chandrashekaran Gurunathan.
