Treating diabetes may be possible through the discovery of chemical that affects biological clock

ScienceDaily (July 12, 2012) - Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered a chemical that offers a completely new and promising direction for the development of drugs to treat metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes -- a major public health concern in the United States due to the current obesity epidemic.

Their discovery, detailed in a paper published July 13 in an advance online issue of the journal Science,initially came as a surprise because the chemical they isolated does not directly control glucose production in the liver, but instead affects the activity of a key protein that regulates the internal mechanisms of our daily night and day activities, which scientists call our circadian rhythm or biological clock.

Scientists had long suspected that diabetes and obesity could be linked to problems in the biological clock. Laboratory mice with altered biological clocks, for example, often become obese and develop diabetes. Two years ago, a team headed by Steve Kay, dean of the Division of Biological Sciences at UC San Diego, discovered the first biochemical link between the biological clock and diabetes. It found that a key protein, cryptochrome, that regulates the biological clocks of plants, insects and mammals also regulates glucose production in the liver and that altering the levels of this protein could improve the health of diabetic mice.

Read the full article here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120712144749.htm