New ‘smart’ insulin promises automatic blood sugar level adjustments

Scientists in the US have developed a new type of 'smart' insulin that can automatically adjust blood sugar levels, thus facilitating future efforts to treat the disease.

Created by the University of Utah, the new agent, dubbed Ins-PBA-F,  is a long-lasting form of insulin that self-activates when blood sugar levels rise. One injection works for a minimum of 14 hours, during which time it can repeatedly and automatically lower glucose levels when sugar is consumed.

Tests using mice with type 1 diabetes have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach, with Ins-PBA-F proving to act more quickly and offer better performance in lowering blood sugar than existing insulin therapies.

Indeed, the speed and kinetics of the new insulin's blood sugar regulation were shown to be in mouse models to healthy subjects whose blood sugar was regulated by their own insulin.

Co-first author Dr Danny Chou, assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah, said: "This is an important advance in insulin therapy. Our insulin derivative appears to control blood sugar better than anything that is available to diabetes patients right now."

Given the growing prevalence of diabetes both in the UK and worldwide, this could be a potentially important discovery.