July 13, 2017 – Repurposed asthma drug shows blood sugar improvement among some diabetics
After 12 weeks of taking an anti-asthma drug, a subset of patients with type 2 diabetes showed a clinically significant reduction in blood glucose during a randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, report University of California San Diego School of Medicine and University of Michigan researchers.
In a paper published 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.