Are You Ready… for faster acting insulin?
The outcomes of a 2018 collaboration between the RAMP Centre and researchers from the Appel Group at Stanford University were recently published in Science Translational Medicine.
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Right now if you’re a Type I diabetic, you need to inject insulin at the appropriate time to process the glucose load from your food. Current products are slow to act, and have a residual release time in the body. That makes them inefficient, and inconvenient. The technology presented in this paper suggests a path towards new insulin formulations that are 1) fast acting, 2) have less residual time in the body, and 3) have a good “shelf life”. That means you could more reasonably inject your insulin at meal time (instead of 30-45 minutes ahead) for optimal effect. The result is better control of your blood sugar, and more convenience. CSIRO’s RAMP centre is proud to have made a contribution to this fantastic work by the Appel Group, and especially enjoyed hosting Anton A.A. Smith and Joseph L. Mann here in our Melbourne labs.
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It’s a long way to the… end of testing 1500 AC/DC polymer candidates.
Insulin has been used to treat diabetes for almost 100 years; yet, current rapid-acting insulin formulations do not do not act quickly enough to provide good control at mealtime. In the RAMP centre, we implement high-throughput, controlled, radical polymerization techniques to generate a large library of acrylamide carrier/dopant copolymer (AC/DC) excipients (a substance formulated alongside the active ingredient of a medication, included for the purpose of long-term stabilization) designed to reduce insulin aggregation. Our top-performing AC/DC excipient candidate enabled the development of an ultrafast-absorbing insulin lispro (UFAL) formulation, which remains stable under stressed aging conditions for 25 hours, compared to 5 hours for commercial fast-acting insulin lispro formulations (Humalog). In a porcine animal model of insulin-deficient diabetes, UFAL exhibited peak action at 9 min, whereas commercial Humalog exhibited peak action at 25 min. These ultrafast kinetics make UFAL a promising candidate for improving glucose control and reducing burden for patients with diabetes.
Our ultrafast insulin work in @ScienceTM is a great example of everything awesome that can come out of international collaborations. Thanks @AlmarPostma @shaunchoward and Ben Muir @CSIRO for working with @JosephLMann and @AntonAASmith to make some killer polymers! https://t.co/SSJw0MkGcb
— Eric A. Appel (@AppelGroup) July 2, 2020
Stanford University news article on the work.
Summary of all media reports on this work from Altmetric.
Highlighted in a Sep 2020 spotlight article in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences