3M Pharmaceuticals Abbott Laboratories, Animas Corporation, AstraZeneca, Sanofi- Aventis Pharmaceuticals Inc., Becton Dickinson and Company, Bristol Meyers Squibb Company, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Medtronic MiniMed, Merck and Co. Inc., Novartis, Novo Nordisk Pharmaceuticals Inc., Pfizer, Proctor and Gamble Pharmaceuticals, Roche Laboratories Inc., Takeda Pharmaceuticals
Studies indicates that health spending associated with diabetes and pre-diabetes was about US$ 194 Billion in 2010.
Factoring in the additional costs of undiagnosed diabetes, prediabetes, and gestational diabetes brings the total cost of diabetes in the United States in 2007 to $218 billion.
Diabetes is a growing global epidemic. It has been estimated that around 52% of the adult population will have diabetes or pre-diabetes by 2020. 90% of people with prediabetes are unaware of their condition. Approximately 25% of the population with diabetes is also unaware of their condition. In the US alone, over 48 million prescriptions for biguanides such as metformin are written annually.
U.S. healthcare costs are drastically increasing because of Diabetes placing growing strain on the budgets of families, employers, states, and the federal government. Studies indicate that health spending associated with diabetes and pre-diabetes consumes approximately 7% of total U.S. health spending. Complications extending from Diabetes lead to high blood pressure, kidney disease, blindness, heart disease and stroke, nervous system disease, and even amputation.
Though many products exist in the current market as a therapeutic, no curative solutions have been developed to date. There are many international pharmaceutical companies spending billions on research annually to try to get to an effective cure. Many oral solutions currently available for patients have severe side effects and weaken the pancreas over time due to un-natural constant pressure to produce insulin. This sometimes provides more harmful outcomes in the longer term.
Major pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly, Roche, Sanofi, and many others have spent billions of dollars over the last decades developing injectable incretin hormones to improve glycemic control through glucose - stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS) in the in the body via activation of signaling pathways. Till date, the effector proteins which mediate incretin action in Beta cells remain poorly defined.
D-Helix has the exclusive commercial rights to a proprietary patented discovery that could result in a novel drug target for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Mice with global knockout of the gene as well as B-cell specific deletion of the gene were generated. The results show that the deficiency in this gene impairs Glucose Induced Insulin Secretion and abolishes the effect of Byetta, a drug currently marketed by Eli Lilly, on GSIS. The overexpression of our identified gene in mice could enhance the effects of Byetta. and other diabetes therapeutics already marketed. Due to the discovery of the effects of the gene on GSIG and the role B-cells, this technology could be used to screen for novel anti-diabetes drugs.
Next steps would be to identify a major pharmaceutical partner specializing in this area and co-developing a more effective and economical product in the market than those available today.