Millions of people around the world suffer from diabetes. Against insulin resistance, physicians offer two options to people with diabetes. The first and most important is diet, and the second is insulin injections if insulin resistance is advanced.
For type 1 diabetics, insulin injections are life-saving, but they can also lead to laziness and recklessness in eating and drinking.
Researchers are working on what will soon be a new alternative to syringes or insulin pumps.
Researchers have found a new way to deliver insulin to the body.
The new insulin can be eaten by taking a capsule or, better still, a piece of chocolate.
Inside these, we find tiny nanocarriers to which the insulin is attached. The particles are so small that they cannot even be seen under a normal microscope.
“This way of getting insulin is more precise because it delivers insulin quickly to the parts of the body that need it most. When you take insulin with a syringe, it spreads throughout the body where it can cause unwanted side effects,” explains Peter McCourt. He is a professor at the Norwegian Arctic University UiT and one of the researchers behind the study.
Together with researchers from Australia, he was involved in the development of the new insulin method. The research was recently published in Nature Nanotechnology.
Researchers at the University of Sydney and the Sydney Local Health District, in collaboration with UiT, discovered years ago that it was possible to deliver drugs to the liver via nanocarriers. The method was then further developed in Australia and Europe.
Many drugs can be taken orally, but until now it was necessary to inject insulin into the body with a syringe.
Cover Photo: Researchers hope that a new medicine will be ready in two to three years. If that happens, patients can stop taking insulin by injection and instead take a capsule like these. (Photo: Nicholas Hunt)