JDRF Sponsors $100,000 Prize to Encourage the Development of Glucose-Responsive Insulins

JDRF is offering a $100,000 prize for innovative ideas on how to develop a glucose-responseive insulin

Earlier this month, JDRF announced that it would award a $100,000 prize for innovative ideas for developing a glucose-responsive insulin. JDRF is simply looking for ideas at this point, and later phases of the competition will further develop the idea for testing in animals and humans. As a reminder, glucose-responsive or glucose-dependent insulin is insulin that works progressively, based on the level of blood glucose. The higher the blood sugar, the more the insulin works – and below a certain level of blood glucose it won’t work at all, minimizing the risk of both hypo- and hyperglycemia. A “solver” looking to win the $100,000 prize will ideally propose an idea for a glucose-responsive insulin that: a) maintains glucose levels between 70 and 110 mg/dl most of the time, with after-meal values rising to no more than 160mg/dl for no longer than an hour; b) prevents overdosing of insulin; and c) reduces the burden of managing diabetes by minimizing human intervention. JDRF is envisioning that a glucose-responsive insulin would ideally only need to be taken once per day (at maximum), would entail no delivery devices like insulin pumps, and would require little to no monitoring of blood glucose. Wow – phenomenal from a patient perspective - development of such an insulin would be an amazing achievement as it would not only bring outstanding glucose control, but it would help alleviate what can be significant stress and hassle that comes with living with diabetes. A glucose responsive insulin could also make insulin therapy a lot safer –according to a 2007 study, insulin was the second most commonly implicated medication in ER visits in people over 65 years old (the first was Warfarin, a blood thinner).

JDRF is working with the crowdsourcing* company InnoCentive to offer the prize to anyone who signs up for the challenge (you can do so free here). Solvers must transfer their exclusive intellectual property rights to JDRF, so we don't necessarily expect this challenge to attract significant attention from pharmaceutical companies and researchers who might be more interested in pursuing the commercial route themselves, although the $100,000 is just a starting point for JDRF grants – there is more money available for further development.

JDRF has already sponsored industry to develop a glucose-responsive insulin. But with this prize, its goal is to attract new people and approaches to the table. Fresh ideas have certainly helped with artificial pancreas research, an area that has made significant progress in the past five years. Indeed, many of the best researchers and most novel algorithms have come from other fields like chemical engineering, applied mechanics, computational neuroscience, and nuclear physics.

As you might expect, there is also interest in developing glucose-responsive insulin among pharmaceutical companies. In late 2010, Merck purchased Smart Cells Inc., a small Massachusetts-based company (funded in part by JDRF) that is developing a glucose-responsive insulin product aptly named SmartInsulin (for more information, see NewNowNext in diaTribe #29). As we understand it, this compound is still in animal testing. We also believe that Novo Nordisk is working on a glucose-responsive insulin, and undoubtedly other ambitious pharmaceutical companies are as well. --AB/KC

*Crowdsourcing asks an undefined, large group of people (a crowd) to solve a problem or complete a task. In the case of Innocentive, organizations can post challenges or problems and “Solvers” can log on to the site (InnoCentive currently has 250,000 registered solvers from 200 countries) and submit solutions. In the past, Eli Lilly, Roche, NASA, and Procter & Gamble have all posted on the site. Since 2001, over 1,300 challenges have been posted with over $28 million in awards offered – according to the company, the average success rate is 50%. Awards range from $5,000 to $1 million based on the complexity of the problem.