As a later-in-life diabetic, this gives me hope:
Meanwhile, Ali Tavassoli at the University of Southampton, UK, has found a small molecule known as compound 14, which indirectly activates a metabolic sensor called AMPK. To see if compound 14 might be a good treatment for metabolic disorders, he and his colleagues fed mice a high-fat diet so they became obese and developed diabetes-like symptoms, then gave them compound 14.
“The results floored us,” says Tavassoli. After just seven daily doses of the drug, the mice lost weight and their diabetes symptoms disappeared. By comparison, people whose diabetes is treated with metformin, which works through a similar pathway to compound 14, tend to gain weight. In more recent, unpublished work, Tavassoli and his team showed that patterns of gene expression in the animals’ fat cells no longer reflect obesity, but resemble those of normal-weight mice. Compound 14, says Tavassoli, appears to be “profoundly reprogramming” the metabolism of these mice.
So far, these substances have mostly been tested in non-human animals. But the relevant metabolic pathways are similar in people, which makes Evans optimistic that activating PPAR-delta or similar master switches could “reboot physiology” in us too. He says pressing such switches could be all it takes to go from sluggish and overweight to fit and athletic. [“Exercise pills: Should we use drugs that mimic benefits of a workout?” Jo Marchant, NewScientist (24 April 2021, paywall)]
Given I became type 2 diabetic after surgery and heavy antibiotic use, and it’s apparently common for type 2 to kick in after a big jolt to the system, I have to wonder if this Compound 14 reactivates an inadvertently shutdown metabolic pathway. Or turns it off.
Ah, but if I were a mouse!
