type II diabetes news from FierceBioResearcher

What do you get when you mix 20 drug developers active in the diabetes field with a room full of geneticists? Hopefully, a new generation of therapies that pinpoint subsets of the disease, each with Read more...

A team of Australian scientists has found an enzyme in diabetics that prevents them from producing insulin. The researchers say that they intend to start working with drug developers to block Read more...

Sirtris Pharmaceuticals and two leading sirtuin researchers, David A Sinclair, Ph.D. and Leonard P. Guarente, Ph.D., have published a review of the work being done to develop therapies to treat Read more...

One route to a long and healthy life may be establishing the right balance in insulin signaling between the brain and the rest of the body, according to new research from Children’s Hospital Read more...

Scientists at Penn and Howard Hughes Medical Institute believe that their investigation of the role fat metabolism plays in the development of Type 2 diabetes has pointed to a new drug target. Their focus is a protein that plays a role in fat metabolism. The protein Akt2/PKB prevents fat metabolism by adding a phosphate group to PGC-1a, which is needed to trigger the genes needed for fat metabolism. Both PGC-1a and Akt2/PKB are good targets for new drug development, according to the …

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Scientists at Oxford and the University of Exeter say that a variant of the FTO gene that is carried by 16 percent of white Europeans made them 70 percent more likely to be obese than those with an alternative variant. Everyone is born is with two copies of the FTO gene, but there are two variants that are inherited. The group at the highest risk was on average 3 kg heavier than the low-risk group, and they carried 15 percent more body weight rather than muscle. The discovery is likely to …

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An international team of scientists including Professor Philippe Froguel of Imperial College, London has identified a group of genetic variants that they believe can flag the risk of type 2 diabetes in 70 percent of all cases. The research points the way to new genetic tests that will be able to identify most of the population at risk of adult-onset diabetes. Once they are identified, a combination of diet and exercise could head off the disease. Their work could also advance fresh …

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More Research

A team of South Korean researchers say they've made a key breakthrough in determining how the TRIM5 protein blocks the progression of HIV. The team says it found a domain in TRIM5 that blocks advancement and also determined the three-dimensional structure of the domain. That work, they say, can advance research into finding a cure for AIDS. …

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A common genetic variation may be more significant than obesity as an indicator that a person is at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a team of UK researchers. The team found that people with two copies of the mutant TCF7L2 gene were twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes as people with no copies. The researchers tracked the cases of 2,676 European middle-aged men who have been evaluated over a period …

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Taking precursors of the pancreas of embryonic pigs and transplanting them into rats was an effective way to get them to start producing insulin without triggering a response from the immune system, according to researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. As a result, they were able to cure not only type 1 but type 2 diabetes in the animal models. Their work points to a possible therapy for type 2 diabetes that won't require powerful immune …

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