An extract from an african leaf fungus may someday set diabetics free, replacing painful and endless insulin injections with a simple pill.
Diabetes occurs when the body can't produce or process insulin, a key protein regulating how the cells use glucose. Because digestive juices break down insulin, diabetics must inject it directly into the bloodstream. Biochemist Bei Zhang and her team at Merck Research Laboratories screened 50,000 chemical combinations searching for a molecule that could duplicate insulin's effects yet survive a trip through the stomach. The researchers finally found their miracle molecule in a sample of a leaf fungus the company collected outside Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Just like insulin, the fungal compound kick-starts a chain of events in the cells that allows them to process glucose. But the small molecule is not a protein, so "it is not subject to the action of digestive enzymes," says ...
