Insulin capsule in diabetes

Future Diabetes Therapy: Capsule is designed to release insulin

03/05/2013

Congenital diabetes mellitus could be better to treat in the future. Dresden researchers developed a capsule designed to produce insulin under the skin of patients. The small container is the size of a pacemaker and should replace the previous procedures in certain patient groups.

Capsule with insulin may be better than insulin pump and donor organ
„For therapy, about ten percent of type 1 diabetics are eligible“, explained Stefan R. Bornstein from the University Hospital of the TU Dresden shortly before a congress of the German Diabetes Society to the news agency „dpa“. Pumping insulin is often difficult for them.

Therefore, these patients have previously transplanted pancreas or insulin-producing cells from donor organs. However, it often comes to rejection reactions. In addition, there would not be sufficient numbers of organs available. The insulin capsule would therefore have decisive advantages. „The recipient of the capsule would not need to take immunosuppressants anymore“, reported Bornstein. The research is in two to three years so far that the new therapy could be tested on humans.

Type 1 diabetes due to genetic and environmental factors
Congenital diabetes (type 1) is an autoimmune disease in which the body's own immune system attacks and destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas through an inflammatory reaction (insulitis). As a result, insulin deficiency increasingly arises, which leads to a lack of substrate in the cells, to an increase in blood sugar, to hyperacidity of the blood, to loss of water and nutrients and to rapid weight loss. If the person does not receive any treatment, a life-threatening clinical picture can develop, the ketoacidotic coma.

The cause of the disease is the involvement of many factors that are genetically determined by environmental factors. Currently, about 300,000 Germans suffer from type 1 diabetes. (Ag)

Image: Michael Horn