Stop the clock on diabetes

More than one million Australians are registered as having diabetes. Many thousands more have the condition but are unaware of it as yet. Like the rest of the world Australia is in the grip of a tidal wave of diabetes that threatens to engulf the health system. Understandably a lot of research is going to find ways to prevent and treat the condition. While diet and exercise remain the fundamental and preferred options for sufferers of type 2 diabetes (non-insulin dependent) many new avenues are being explored. One new study has promised hope of a drug that could treat diabetes by adjusting your biological clock.

Your biological clock dictates the circadian rhythm that runs your body’s internal processes and the idea that it is linked to the development of diabetes is not new. One element of the biological clock is to keep the brain supplied with glucose. To do this when you are asleep and therefore fasting, the clock triggers the release of hormones that cause the production of glucose by your liver. When you are awake and eating those fasting hormones are shut down and the liver should not produce glucose.

Diabetes is essentially an accumulation of glucose in the blood and research has previously shown that mice with altered biological clocks often become obese and develop diabetes. This new study however, has found a specific component of the biological clock that is easily reproducible as a drug and which could be used in diabetes management.

It all comes back to a protein called cryptochrome which controls glucose production in the liver. It has also been shown that cryptochrome controls the cycle of eating patterns and helps maintain steady levels of glucose in the bloodstream. Cryptochrome however, is a large molecule and what these researchers have now discovered is much smaller molecule called KL001 that controls the activity of cryptochrome.

Essentially, what KL001 does is to stop cryptochrome being broken down and this in turn stops the production of liver enzymes that cause glucose to be released into the bloodstream. The researchers have shown that KL001 stops glucose being produced by liver cells. If it pans out that the molecule works to reduce glucose levels in humans that could be promising since its small size make it a viable option as a drug. As we said earlier, prevention through lifestyle measures is the real key to diabetes management but this novel approach of adjusting the biological clock could be sweet news indeed.