from Hacker News

Sugar-Breathing Glycopolymersomes for Regulating Glucose Level

by uber1geek on 6/1/17, 5:39 AM with 14 comments

• by jimrandomh on 6/1/17, 5:01 PM

  This may be a useful adjunct to insulin therapy, but there is no possibility whatsoever that it will be a replacement for it.

  Insulin is the molecule that signals to cells that it is okay to take in and use sugar that's in the blood. This is a molecule that buffers sugar; if there's a high sugar concentration in the blood it binds it together and if there's a low sugar concentration it releases it. This would normally be one of the functions of the liver, but the latter part (absorbing excess sugar for storage) won't happen without insulin signaling. If you give this to a type 1 diabetic without also giving insulin, all that will happen is that it'll absorb sugar until it reaches capacity; the cells that should be using sugar for energy still won't be able to.

• by uber1geek on 6/1/17, 5:40 AM

  Scientists create "sugar sponge" which can be injected into diabetics to sop up and bind glucose when glucose levels are high, and release the sugar when its concentrations are low. They also tested the sponge in mice with type-I diabetes, and within two days, they saw antidiabetic effects.

• by lolc on 6/1/17, 10:41 PM

  This could could make my diabetes much easier to manage. Though injecting sugar balls into my bloodstream does not sound like the first thing I will try. Testing it on mice with their short life span is bound to miss effects that take a while to accumulate. And diabetes is all about accumulating damage. I will wait for the fallout from long-term trials. (Haha, I have to anyway, it's regulated for these reasons.)

  But hey, wouldn't doping your blood with sugar be of interest with athletes?

• by amelius on 6/1/17, 7:11 PM

  Here's a Wired story about a more controversial technique: [1].

  Quoting:

  > His team used genetic tweaks to prevent rats from making their own pancreases. Then they injected mouse stem cells (complete with all the necessary pancreas-making genes) into the developing pancreas-less rat embryos. The rats grew normally. The only thing different was their pancreases were made almost entirely of mouse cells.

  > Then they went a step further. From those rat-mouse chimeras, Nakauchi’s team took out tiny clusters of pancreatic cells that make insulin (called islets) and transplanted them into diabetic mice. The islets settled in and made enough insulin to keep the host mice’s blood glucose levels in a normal range for more than a year. In layman’s terms? The mice were cured.

  [1] https://www.wired.com/2017/01/first-human-pig-chimera-step-t...

• by Darvict on 6/1/17, 5:45 AM

  Woah. This is actually potentially massive. Sugar is an epidemic.