“Diabetes is rising at an alarming rate and it’s become increasingly important to find new alternatives for developing effective and budget-friendly drugs for patients suffering with the disease,” said Harish Vashisth, associate professor of chemical engineering. “Our work found that the modeled Con-Ins variants, or analogs, bind even better to receptors in the body than the human hormone and may work faster which could make them a favorable option for stabilizing blood sugar levels and a potential for new therapeutics.”
In their study, recently published in the journal Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics, researchers looked more closely at the cone snail venom which induces a hypoglycemic reaction00 that lowers blood sugar levels. Unlike insulin made in the body, the venom’s peptide sequence - which allows it to bind to human insulin receptors – is much shorter. To test whether it would still bind effectively, the researchers used sequences of the insulin-like peptides in the venom of the cone snail C. geographus as a template to model six different Con-Ins analogs. The newly created variants were made up of much shorter peptide chains than human insulin - lacking the last eight residues of the B-chain of the human insulin.