Predicting Type 2 Diabetes May Have Gotten Easier: It is widely known that type 2 diabetes is typically developed as a byproduct of lifestyle and diet choice. It is also prone to development due to certain health conditions. However, there may be a predictor of the development of type 2 diabetes that may open new strategies in diabetic health care.
Globes Online reported that drug developer Compugen, “Found and experimentally confirmed a genetic biomarker, CGEN-40001, for predisposition to type 2 diabetes.”
According to Wikipedia a biomarker (biological marker), “Is in general a substance used as an indicator of a biological state. It is a characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, or pharmacologic responses to a therapeutic intervention. It is used in many scientific fields.”
What this means is the CGEN-4001 biomarker has the potential to be used as a preemptive test for the development of type 2 diabetes.
Globes Online reported, “Following diagnosis, high-risk patients may benefit from more aggressive management either through lifestyle modification or drug treatment. There are an estimated 24 million people in the US with diabetes, 90% of whom have type 2 diabetes.”
The CGEN-4001 biomarker is essentially an enzyme that naturally occurs in your body. Globes Online said, “From the approximately 350,000 multiple nucleotide genetic variations… a very small set of 135 variations was selected as being potentially related to type 2 diabetes in Caucasians. Compugen studied this set and found a specific enzyme CGEN-4001 which demonstrated the predicted correlation with type 2 diabetes in Caucasians. Lab studies showed that adding the enzyme increases the risk of type 2 diabetes by 50-80%.”
While the presence of CGEN-4001 can be a predictor of the development of type 2 diabetes it may also lead some medical scientists to wonder if therapies may be developed that could remove CGEN-4001 from the body as a means of reducing the incidence of diabetes.
However, this can be little more than conjecture as studies and research continue into this novel and still potential method of diabetes prediction.
The CGEN-4001 is an enzyme variation of what is known as Phosphofructokinase platelet (PFKP), which is used to effectively deal with glucose. The variation may have something to do with the alterations within the bodies of those who are developing type 2 diabetes.
Compugen, and Israeli based pharmaceutical company gained as much as $2.00 per share on the stock exchange in response to these new findings. According to their website, “Compugen’s mission is to be the world leader in the discovery and licensing of product candidates to the drug and diagnostic industries under milestone and revenue sharing agreements. The Company’s increasing inventory of powerful and proprietary discovery platforms is enabling the predictive discovery – field after field – of numerous therapeutic and diagnostic product candidates. These discovery platforms are based on the Company’s decade-long focus on the predictive understanding of important biological phenomena at the molecular level. Compugen’s current collaborations include Biosite, Medarex, Inc., Merck & Co., Inc., Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics (a Johnson & Johnson company), Roche, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, Inc., and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.”
This current research is in line with their stated mission; “Compugen’s research and discovery efforts are focused on developing unique predictive biology capabilities, which utilize computational technologies and experimental processes, to obtain deeper understandings of life at the molecular level and to incorporate these understandings in the development of diagnostic and therapeutic discovery engines.”