This discovery is one of the greatest advances in diabetes research for 15 years. Diabetes is an increasingly widespread disease, unfortunately it affects 480 million people worldwide, including three million French people. It is a disease in which the sugar brought by food remains in the blood instead of penetrating in the cells to be transformed there into energy or to be stored there. This excess of glucose in the blood, which is called hyperglycemia, can in the long term damage certain organs, the kidneys, the eyes, the arteries and the heart in particular. This is why doctors prescribe a suitable diet and treatments to patients.
But the limit of current drugs is that even if they are effective in regulating blood sugar, they do not stop the progression of the disease, but the new class of drug that has just been discovered by researchers works, it , differently: it attacks one of the causes of excess sugar in the blood.
This treatment is different from the previous ones because the researchers started from the fact that in healthy people: adipose tissue, the fat in our body normally captures 10% of the sugar circulating in the blood and then transforms it into good lipids, useful to the body. But in people with diabetes, explains Vincent Marion, a researcher at Inserm, one of the scientists who led this work, for insulin-resistant diabetics: fatty tissues have lost their ability to capture glucose from the blood.
The good news is that this mechanism can be restored. And this is precisely the purpose of this new experimental treatment which could therefore, via regular injections, regulate the level of sugar in the blood. The first tests on mice, rats and dogs have shown that it also improves, in a few months, the state of the liver and the heart. Human testing is expected to start next year in the United States.
If all goes well, these researchers are planning to put it on the market within 10 years and they are aiming for a treatment with fewer side effects than current treatments.