WOW! Israeli researchers deliver insulin via PILL!!!

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[OG Applause: This is truly remarkable and will mean so much to those Type 1s who have always had to inject and to those Type 2s who have to inject after 5-10 years. Thank heavens I may never have to go to the dreaded needle!]

July 5, 2001 16:55 (Israel time)

Israeli researchers deliver insulin via pill

Reuters

Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem has become the first to orally deliver insulin to the bloodstream of healthy humans, an advance researchers said Thursday may soon improve the lives of 135 million diabetics worldwide.

The hospital said insulin showed up in the liver and bloodstream of 12 non-diabetic volunteers within 30 minutes of ingesting the new pill. Currently, diabetics have to inject insulin into the bloodstream with a needle.

The new pill was developed by Emisphere Technologies, Inc., a New York biopharmaceutical company. It said in a statement that clinical trials had started on June 25 in Israel and the Netherlands.

Researchers plan to begin tests on adult diabetics, but no date has been set, the company statement said. "That is the majority of people who suffer from diabetes," Dr. Miriam Kidron, a diabetes researcher at the hospital, told Reuters. "As we get older, more people get the disease."

Diabetes occurs when the body fails to produce and absorb enough insulin, a hormone that controls the passage of sugar from blood. It usually hits middle-aged and overweight people and can also be hereditary.

Oral drugs have been developed to prevent insulin resistance among these patients, but about one-third must still inject insulin on a regular basis, Kidron said. "Their diabetes will continue to be much better if they can get the insulin through the pill," Kidron added.

If more trials are approved by the Health Ministry, the pill will also be tested on people suffering from juvenile-onset diabetes, a much more serious form of the disease, which can at times be fatal.

Juvenile diabetes accounts for 10 percent of all patients and they must follow a strict regime of regular insulin injections, Kidron said.

Shares of Emisphere Technologies closed up 0.07 percent on Tuesday at $25.05.

-- Anonymous, July 05, 2001


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