A Tufts chemistry teacher and a small group of undergraduate students may have developed a method for the early detection of Type 2 diabetes, which could someday be used to neutralize the increasingly prevalent disease before symptoms appear.
Dr. David H. Lee, an assistant chemistry professor, said that low levels of the hormone adiponectin are usually associated with Type 2 diabetes.
"What's interesting about the hormone is that it's assembled into three different complexes so the hormone occurs in three different forms in your body," he said. The largest of the three forms "gives the best indicator for diabetes."
Distinguishing the three different forms of adiponectin from one another, although a difficult task, is what Dr. Lee and his team are doing.
"I'm developing technology to measure these three different forms because current existing technologies just measure the total amount of adiponectin, but it has become important to be able to measure each form individually," he said.
Cory Rillahan (LA '07), one of Lee's former undergraduate students, collaborated closely with him on the technology, and the paper Rillahan authored on their research was recently submitted to a journal for publication.
"He worked really hard on this," Lee said of Rillahan.
Rillahan, who is now in a Ph.D. program at the Scripps Research Institute, said the forms can be separated because they bind to positively charged molecules with varying strengths.
"The separation works because the three forms of the hormone all have differing amounts of negative charges ... So if you bind them all to a positively charged support, you can pull each one off separately based upon their differing charges," he said.
Alan West, a senior currently working on the project with Lee, said that the method of separation Rillahan and Lee devised could be used as a test for diabetes.
"What we're going to do is [conduct] different tests to see if you have a group of people, or maybe a group of mice, that are diabetic, and see if we can get any data correlating between the diabetic condition and the ratio between these three different forms of the hormone," West said.
Lee said he believes the technology is already "quite good," but bringing the test to market will likely require a great deal of effort.
"There are a lot of hurdles to go still in terms of the business aspect," he said. "People need to kind of convince themselves that the market for this is going to be really good."
The demand for a test that could forecast Type 2 diabetes could be significant. Around seven percent of Americans have diabetes, and 90 to 95 percent of those cases are Type 2.
Currently, Lee is talking with a company, but did not give further detail as to when the project might result in a marketed product.
Jordan Jastrab, another senior working on the project with Lee, suggested that the technology might eventually be able to help neutralize new cases of diabetes.
"Other studies have shown that administering adiponectin can increase the insulin response in desensitized cells, alleviating symptoms of Type 2 diabetes," he said.
By being able to detect a decrease in adiponectin, doctors may be able to predict who is close to getting diabetes, and then take preventative measures.
Jastrab said that, as a student, he was glad for the opportunity to apply what he has learned in classes to a real situation.
"It's hard to really get a sense of how one's work could eventually help a significant amount of people when it's being done in the lab, far away from the people it's intending to eventually help," he said.
"But learning about how research on a level as small as looking at the structure of a single protein can translate into better clinical practices certainly adds another dimension to the rewards from doing this kind of research."
