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EASD: Contest Offers $100K for ”New Insulin”

By Kristina Fiore, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

LISBON — One diabetes advocacy group is betting that the next big thing in treatment, especially for type 1 disease, will come not from within the field, but from putting together many heads from various disciplines.

With the help of a top crowd-sourcing company, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) has put out a call for new blueprints on a glucose-responsive insulin, offering a $100,000 incentive to anyone in the general public who comes up with the best plausible design.

”Ideally, what we would love to have is an insulin that reacts to the level of glucose in your body,” Aaron Kowalski, PhD, assistant vice president of treatment therapies at JDRF, said during a press briefing at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes meeting here.

The competition is ”a unique way to drive innovation and get people that haven’t worked in this field thinking about it,” he said.

Insulin today requires significant management and effort, he added, and even with newer formulations of the drug, patients still have excursions into hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia.

A glucose-responsive insulin, on the other hand, could deliver the appropriate amount needed solely in response to circulating blood glucose levels and may offer better glycemic control.

Glucose-responsive insulin isn’t an entirely new concept, according to Sanjoy Dutta, PhD, director of glucose control therapies for JDRF.

”This is an area that has had some attempts and has met some success,” Dutta said during the briefing. ”So, we’re not really going to Mars.”

In fact, Merck recently acquired SmartCells, a company JDRF had supported in the past, for its SmartInsulin technology.

SmartInsulin works via competitive binding, in which a polymer-therapeutic is bound to an engineered glucose-binding molecule. Insulin is only released when the therapeutic is unbound by a specific glucose concentration, according to the company.

But JDRF said it is open to other alternatives and solutions from the general public — although brochures for the contest state that ”researchers and scientists from outside of the diabetes field are strongly encouraged to apply.”

Kowalski expects chemists and biochemists, for instance, to have much to contribute.

The call for written proposals is up on the website of the crowd-sourcing company, InnoCentive, which connects ”solvers” – researchers from a wide variety of disciplines – with ”seekers” – companies looking for solutions to a specific problem.

In the past, InnoCentive has partnered on other medical challenges, including a $1 million prize for identification of a biomarker in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, awarded last February.

JDRF plans to give out up to four awards that will be further developed in proof-of-concept studies. Winners may be involved as part of ”a larger project team that may involve commercial partners,” should JDRF attract a company ”with expertise and infrastructure” to get to the ultimate goal of developing a drug, Kowalski said.

Winners will agree to exclusively license the rights of their design to the JDRF, he added.

Dutta said the winning candidate may be a boon not only for patients with type 1 disease, but that it also may work for the millions more patients with type 2 disease as well.

JDRF has long been a major supporter of the ”artificial pancreas” program, which many have also touted as a promising solution to glucose regulation. Kowalski said the new initiative will help to advance treatment by ”taking the machinery, and making it molecular.”

The contest application deadline is Nov. 9.

Nyhetsinfo
www red DiabetologNytt
Publicerad: |2011-09-19|

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