SmartInsulin—Not Your Mother's Insulin
SmartInsulin is being developed by SmartCells Inc. as what some have called a revolutionary new approach to insulin delivery. As many of you know, the fundamental problem with insulin is knowing exactly when to take it and how much to take – nobody wants to forget insulin during a high blood sugar episode, and it's obviously downright dangerous to take insulin when you're moving toward hypoglycemia. While there are "glycemic-dependent" drugs (Januvia and Byetta) that stop working when you reach normal blood glucose level, there is no such "smart" insulin. It's very easy to overdose insulin, particularly if you are trying to have very tight glucose control, and SmartInsulin might help to solve that problem.
SmartInsulin is essentially normal insulin combined with a special polymer (large molecule) that 'binds' the insulin so that it can't immediately be used by your body. However, when your glucose levels start to get high, the glucose molecules in your blood "unlock" the bound insulin allowing it to be used in your body. Since insulin is only released in response to glucose, this should ideally also prevent hypoglycemia from insulin overdosing. The goal is to develop the drug to be a once-daily injection that gives you insulin when you need it all day long – insulin for basal needs, for food, for stress etc. This project is still in early development, but it's receiving impressive grants from big agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). Hopefully, the company will start human trials with the drug next year, but it will likely be many years before we might see SmartInsulin on the market.
