Type II diabetes – article123

Type II diabetes mellitus is a complex chronic disease that a person develops when the body cannot produce enough insulin or use it effectively. People with Type II diabetes need treatment to keep insulin and blood sugar levels under control.

Insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas that controls the amount of glucose in the blood. Lack of insulin means that the body cannot absorb glucose from the food we eat. When this happens, blood glucose levels rise, and over time, these increased levels may damage blood vessels and reduce the supply of oxygen and nutrient-rich blood to the body’s organs and nerves.

People with Type II diabetes, whose bodies don’t respond well, or are resistant to insulin, may need treatment to help their bodies process glucose better. This can help prevent long-term complications.

Every day we are improving treatment options for people with Type II diabetes. We spare no effort to help, from providing the most effective drugs to the way they are taken.

Discover better ways to improve living with Type II diabetes

Our scientists have a simple goal-to find unmet needs in chronic diseases and turn them into new therapeutic solutions. One such idea is to develop a treatment for Type II diabetes from injections to tablets.

This treatment has been a goal for many years, but the challenge was the digestive system of the body. Once swallowed, biological drugs, such as insulin, are digested by enzymes in the body, in the same way as food is digested. We needed to find a way to pass biological drugs to the digestive tract as they enter the blood.

We recently succeeded and showed that a synthetic version of a peptide hormone such as glucagon 1 (GLP-1 hormone) can be taken in the form of tablets. The hormone GLP-1 is produced naturally in the intestine and is secreted in response to food eaten. When GLP-1 is released, the secretion of insulin in the pancreas is stimulated, which again reduces the amount of glucose in the blood.

This is the world’s first oral treatment for Type II diabetes using a GLP-1 receptor agonist. We hope that as soon as possible we will be able to offer a wide range of oral treatments not only for diabetes but for other serious chronic diseases in our research group.
A powerful production line focused on the needs of patients

Over the course of about 100 years, we have discovered new ways to inject insulin. This was motivated by our commitment to making the process of distributing medicines as simple and convenient as possible.

Our starting point is from people suffering from Type II diabetes, where we learn about the difficulties they face when self-medicating, and understand how to make treatment safer and easier.

We use scientific methods from anthropology to biochemistry to provide data and guidance to enhance our research and engineering skills and expertise.