Predicting diabetes with new imaging tracer

Insulin by BTMFM

This week, Technology Review published an article about a new imaging tracer which tracks insulin cell loss in diabetes. This is great news for patients, clinicians and pharmaceutical companies alike. Patients can be diagnosed earlier and more accurately, while clinicians and pharmaceutical companies can use this new technology for clinical trial evaluation of new drugs for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Created by Dr. Hank Kung at the University of Pennsylvania and presently being developed by Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Inc, this new marker can track progression and will help predict the onset of diabetes. Currently, diabetic symptoms are evident only after 50-90% of the insulin-producing cells are already lost. If this technology can see that a symptom-less patient has 20-30% cell loss, interventions can begin earlier and possibly delay or prevent onset especially for type 2 diabetes.

The marker can distinguish a healthy rat pancreas from a pancreas whose insulin-producing cells have been destroyed, according to results presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine‘s annual meeting in Washington, DC, earlier this month.

The most interesting aspect to this discovery is that cells in the brain and pancreas share many markers. This means that research done in the neuroscience space may be increasingly implemented for diabetes. Neurogenic mechanisms have already been implicated in curing diabetes which will begin clinical testing soon (see previous MaRS blog, “Canadian Team Makes Stunning Diabetic Breakthrough”).

It will also be interesting to see this tracer used with the new state-of-the-art PET-MRI imaging systems and discover how far we can go in “seeing” and then curing diabetes.