New hormone for lowering blood sugar discovered

Scientists have identified a new hormone that can lower a person’s blood sugar levels, a finding, which they claim could pave the way for a new and effective treatment for diabetes.

A team at the University of Texas says this new fat-derived hormone would appear to be a useful alternative or add-on to insulin; it can do essentially the same job, sending glucose out of the bloodstream and into muscle.

“It’s like you’ve opened the door and now the glucose can come in,” Jonathan Graff, who led the team, says in the

Cell Metabolism journal.

For its research, the team manipulated a key developmental pathway in the fat stem cells of mice to find that the animals showed remarkably low blood sugar levels.

The animals’ muscles were taking up glucose at two to four times the usual rate thanks to an abundance of glucose transporters at their surfaces. That discovery was all the more striking because the animals also lacked fat stores, a condition known as lipodystrophy that normally results in just the opposite — high blood sugar and diabetes.

The mice could respond normally to insulin, but insulin surprisingly had nothing to do with the muscles’ unusual appetite for sugar. The source for the change wasn’t anything inherently different in the muscle itself either; it was something about those manipulated fat stem cells.

Further experiments revealed that the mouse muscles continued to take up extra sugar when they were isolated in the lab and exposed to blood serum. “It showed these effects were likely secondary to blood-borne signals sent by the manipulated fat cell progenitors,” Mr. Graff says.

That signal can be generated only by fat stem cells, not mature fat cells. “If we can purify this factor and give it to people, there is potential for its use to lower and help control blood sugar,” Mr. Graff says.