Repurposed asthma drug shows blood sugar improvement among some diabetics
In a paper publishing July 5 in Cell Metabolism , a team led by Alan Saltiel, PhD, director of the UC San Diego Institute for Diabetes and Metabolic Health, and Elif Oral, MD, director of the MEND Obesity and Metabolic Disorder Program at the University of Michigan, along with scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, identified a molecular signature in patients who responded to amlexanox, an anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic drug used to treat asthma that was developed in the 1980s in Japan. The discovery is not ready for the clinic, but it does reveal a potential new therapeutic approach for treating type 2 diabetes. "When we looked at the drug-treated group we saw a bimodal distribution, that is, there were some responders and some non-responders. We didn't understand why, so we did a molecular analysis from biopsies of fat cells we took from patients at the beginning and end of the study," said Saltiel. "In the responder group, the level...