Weight control and effect lasts for years: this is the most promising injection to treat diabetes

Daily or weekly injections, treatments that last months, years or even a lifetime. It’s the reality of the people who manage medications like semaglutide which was originally developed for diabetes and is now also prescribed for weight loss.

People with type 2 diabetes have their body’s ability to produce insulin affected.since the pancreas, which is in charge of this function, does not produce it or resists it . Insulin regulates blood sugar, so this condition leads to high blood sugar levels that can cause heart problems, organ damage, and blindness.

To treat it, we usually resort to treatments that modify the way of life of the people, forcing them to constantly administer medication. That is why FractylHealth , a biotechnology company based in Lexington, Massachusettsis developing a unique gene therapy for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, which could also be used in weight management since it uses the same mechanism as semaglutide, intended to reduce blood sugar and body weight.

Semaglutide belongs to a class of medications called GLP-1 receptor agonists . These drugs work by helping the body produce the right amount of insulin at the right time, which helps regulate blood sugar. This means that they are very effective for people with type 2 diabetes.

Semaglutide, marketed under the brand name Ozempic, has been used as a diabetes medication for more than five years . But it has also been discovered that GLP-1 also interacts with parts of the brain involved in appetite and provides a feeling of fullness. This is how semaglutide also causes weight loss and not only in people with diabetes.

But what is its downside? The type of administration, which These are usually weekly injections, which sometimes cause people to stop taking their medications, as they are expensive and can have side effects. such as nausea, diarrhea and constipation. It is also possible that they accidentally forget their doses or that once they reach their goal weight, they drop them. This is problematic because when these treatments are abruptly stopped, blood sugar rises, appetite returns and with it the pounds.

“You have this problem where you have to keep going on therapy to be effective,” Harith Rajagopalan told The Daily Mail. wired gate cardiologist by training and CEO and co-founder of Fractyl Health. “It’s the Achilles heel.”

Rajagopalan wants to avoid the Achilles’ heel with a unique treatment that would last for years. The company’s approach is to deliver an artificial gene to the pancreas that continuously produces the hormone GLP-1. With this, there would no longer be a need for weekly or daily injections and there would be greater continuity in treatments.

Gene therapy is a therapeutic approach that aims to treat genetic or acquired diseases by introducing functional genetic material into an individual’s cells. The main goal of gene therapy is to correct or compensate for a genetic defect that causes a specific disease.

In the case of the Fractyl Health treatment, inactivated viruses are used to deliver a therapeutic gene to pancreatic cells. Vituras are used because of their natural ability to transport genetic material into cells.

This approach has been performed only in animals. Using mice bred to develop type 2 diabetes, they gave a single infusion of the gene therapy in one group and weekly injections of semaglutide in others. The results were surprising: after ten weeks, gene therapy lowered fasting blood sugar by 70%, slightly more than semaglutide, which lowered blood sugar by 64%.

Besides, the therapy also reduced the mice’s body weight by 23% compared to control mice. Company scientists presented the conclusions at the American Diabetes Association conference in late June.

Scientists didn’t expect to see such significant weight loss, since Fractyl’s gene therapy is delivered directly into the pancreas, unlike Ozempic and Wegovy (semaglutide weight-loss drugs) that are injected into the fatty tissues of the thighs, waist, or upper arms and from there enter the bloodstream, where they somehow communicate with the brain .

One explanation given to Wired by endocrinologist and University of Toronto professor of medicine Daniel Drucker is that gene therapy produces enough GLP-1 in the pancreas that some of it enters the circulatory system and communicates with the brain. Another possibility is that there is an unknown signaling mechanism in the pancreas that tells the brain to stop eating.

Although this treatment looks promising, some challenges still need to be addressed. First of all, the pancreas is a very fragile and important organ, because in addition to producing insulin, it produces digestive enzymes that help break down food. However, when ignited, it produces pancreatitis, which can produce enzymes that attack the pancreas and cause permanent damage to the organ.

In addition, it should be considered that gene therapy could be expensive and inaccessible to ordinary mortals. It is also not known if Fractyl gene therapy will cause side effects in humans.

If the single gene therapy works and is safe, it could revolutionize the way it is given to patients with type 2 diabetes or to patients who want to lose weight. But to know that you have to wait, since the company aims to begin a first-in-human trial by the end of 2024, so those answers are still a few years away.