Diabetes advance: Researchers find gene that causes resistance to insulin

Discovery is first gene known to affect how insulin works, not how it is produced

08-Sep-2009 - Canada

A breakthrough by an international team of researchers in Canada, France, the UK and Denmark has uncovered a new gene that could lead to better treatment of type 2 diabetes, as well as a better understanding of how this disease develops.

Unlike most of the genes that have been shown to cause diabetes, the new gene, called Insulin Receptor Substrate 1 (IRS1), doesn't affect how insulin is created in the pancreas, but rather, how the body responds to insulin already in the bloodstream, say the researchers, whose work will be published in Nature Genetics.

"Most of the genes that we've identified as diabetes risk genes to date reduce the function of the pancreas, specifically of beta cells in the pancreas that make insulin," explained Dr. Robert Sladek of McGill University and the Génome Québec Innovation Centre in Montreal, a corresponding author of the paper. "IRS1 has to do with the function of the other tissues in the body. Rather than reduce production of insulin, this gene reduces the effect of insulin in muscles, liver and fat, a process called insulin resistance."

"IRS1 is the first inside the cell that gets activated by insulin," Sladek continued. "It basically tells the rest of the cell, 'hey, insulin is here, start taking in glucose from the blood!' If IRS1 doesn't work, the whole process is disrupted."

The research was conducted by an international team including Sladek, Dr. Constantin Polychronakos of McGill's Faculty of Medicine; Dr. Philippe Froguel of the CNRS and Lille 2 University in France and Imperial College London; Dr. Oluf Pedersen of the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University in Denmark and their colleagues at many institutions across Europe and North America.

This study, which used genetic material drawn from more than 6,000 French participants divided into two separate groups, represents the final step in a series of collaborations between these researchers that has redrawn our understanding of diabetes genetics. In this instance, not only did the researchers pinpoint a new diabetes-linked gene, they found the genetic trigger, which leads to malfunction, in a totally unexpected place.

https://www.bionity.com/en/news/105933/diabetes-advance-researchers-find-gene-that-causes-resistance-to-insulin.html