New drug discovery tool to treat diabetes

Diabetes news reports indicate scientists have harnessed a new type of drug discovery tool to help identify one component of the insulin secretion process. The discovery could create a new class of diabetes drugs to treat type 2 diabetes .
Researchers at Oxford University have utilised the new method to find a small molecule that is being used to understand exactly how insulin is secreted.
Head researcher of the study, Grant Churchill, was reported as commenting: “A lot of diseases are caused by problems with important proteins within cells . We need to find small molecules that change the function of these proteins both to discover how they work and in addition because these small molecules may also work as treatments for disease.”
He reportedly continued: “The approach we have developed allows us to do this much more quickly and cheaply than many of the current methods. Ultimately this will speed up the process of getting better treatments into the clinic for patients. Our method also begins with the natural chemical but rather than modifying it with a time-consuming and expensive chemical syntheses conducted by a team of chemists, ours uses computers to identify corresponding small molecules for research and medicine .”