The drug, harmine, was researched by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City in a study funded by diabetes research foundation JDRF and the National Institutes of Health. Among more than 100,000 drugs, harmine was shown to have the best results, according to a news release.
The compound drove the beta cells that produce insulin to divide, tripling the number of beta cells and leading to better control of blood sugar in three groups of mice engineered to have symptoms similar to human diabetes. The loss of insulin-producing cells is a known cause of type I diabetes, and researchers in recent years have linked the cells’ destruction to the cause of insulin-dependent type II diabetes, according to the news release.
“Our results provide a large body of evidence demonstrating that the harmine drug class can make human beta cells proliferate at levels that may be relevant for diabetes treatment,” said senior study author Andrew Stewart, MD, director of the Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine, in the news release. “While we still have a lot of work to do in improving the specificity and potency of the harmine and related compounds, we believe these results represent a key step toward more effective future treatment of diabetes.”
