Australian gene discovery has implications for diabetes4 June 2012Scientists at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney – one of the largest medical research institutes in Australia – have identified a gene that regulates muscle size. This finding could help unlock therapies for Type 2 diabetes – a chronic (long term) disease which currently afflicts an estimated 285 million people around the world and carries a high risk of many conditions including heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure. The Garvan Institute research has just been published in The FASEB Journal, an online journal issued by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Too much sugarType 2 diabetes is marked by too much sugar in the blood, or a failure of the body to control blood sugar levels properly. The body needs insulin, a hormone released by the pancreas, to channel sugar from the blood into the body’s cells. At the Garvan Institute, researchers were looking at ways to improve the response of muscles to insulin when they were surprised to discover that a strain of genetically modified mice – missing the Grb10 protein – had large muscles. The finding is important for diabetes research because muscles are the biggest users of glucose in the body. The Australian scientists noted that a drug able to reduce Grb10 expression may have the potential to increase muscle mass and thus increase the capacity to move glucose from the blood stream into cells, which has long been a major goal for any diabetes therapy. More information |