Fascinating Discoveries in Type 2 Diabetes

Beta-Cell Harmony

Anne L. Peters, MD: Hi. I am Dr. Anne Peters, reporting from the American Diabetes Association (ADA) meetings in San Francisco. Today I am talking with Dr. Guy Rutter, Professor of Cell Biology at Imperial College in London, about his current research, which concerns the molecular basis of type 2 diabetes. We will discuss what he finds interesting, and how that applies clinically as we treat our patients with diabetes.

Guy A. Rutter, PhD: I'm here to talk about 2 areas of my own research. Chiefly, what I will be presenting at the ADA conference is our recent work on a class of drugs which is becoming increasingly more important -- the incretins -- and the work that we have been doing to understand how these act on the pancreatic beta cell to stimulate the secretion of insulin.^[1]

Specifically, I will be showing that these drugs improve the way in which the beta cells work together as an ensemble to prompt the release of hormones. This is something that wasn't suspected a few years ago -- that each individual cell has its own agenda, but when they work together, they perform far better. It turns out that this is one of the ways in which the incretins work, so we can think about designing other drugs that do the same thing, but in a different way.