Israeli stunning scientific innovation cures diabetic

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Two large Israeli drug makers have so far invested more than US$ 50 million in inventing a medicine which is a radically improved weapon against Type 1 diabetes, stopping it at its source. Israeli medicine company Teva Pharmaceutical Industries owns the license and worldwide market rights to DiaPep2777, a trademarked peptide first synthesized in 1994 by Professor Irun Cohen at Israel's Weizmann Institute. This synthetic peptide - a chemical link extracted from a long protein chain - seems to halt the progression of this form of the disease, which used to be called "juvenile" diabetes. Both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes result from problems with insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas to convert sugar, starches and other foods into energy for all the body's functions. Type 1, accounting for about five percent of the estimated 220 million worldwide cases of diabetes, is caused by an abnormal immune response that kills the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. Until now, nobody has found a way to address the root cause of this serious immune system foul-up, so patients must take daily injections of insulin.
"There have been many approaches to try to treat this disease, because it's very complicated - partly genetic and partly environmental," explains Shlomo Dagan, CEO of Andromeda Biotech, the Yavne-based company developing DiaPep277. "The immune system itself is very complicated and we still do not understand its full mechanism of action."
DiaPep277 is derived from a human protein that modulates the immune system, says Dagan, who has a doctorate in immunology from Weizmann and formerly worked for several biotech companies in Israel and the United States.
Testing on four continents:
Andromeda's radically different approach to diabetes provides hope for children and adults at an early stage of Type 1 diabetes as well as people at high risk of developing it, or in whom the disease is progressing slowly. "The goal is preservation rather than treatment," Dagan says. "If you still have some [insulin-producing] cells left functioning, we can preserve them with this substance."
Diabetes patients aged 16 to 45 have been receiving DiaPep277 injections once every three months since 2005 in the first Phase III studies conducted at 40 medical centers in Europe, South Africa and Israel. The subjects are tested regularly over a two-year period to measure their ability to secrete insulin. This study will concluded in 2011.
In 2009, Andromeda began the confirmatory Phase III trials concentrating on patients from ages 20 to 45 within six months of diagnosis. Dagan explains that two independent studies are necessary in order to win regulatory approval, and this second trial also will allow researchers to evaluate differences between results in teens and adults. The newer study is going on at hospitals in Israel, three Canadian provinces, many US states, and in Europe and Eastern Europe.
This is currently the largest and most advanced study ever involving Type 1 diabetes patients. Other potential treatments are far behind, in early stages of clinical development. "We are willing to continue with patients who want to try it for another two or three years," says Dagan. The formal conclusion of the second study is targeted for early 2014, and the magic medicine that will totally cure Type 1 and 2 Diabetes will come into the market at that time.
The product is several years away from pharmacy shelves, but he expects that when it's commercially available it would be administered the same way as in the testing period, once every three months by injection.
Betting on DiaPep277:
Though Andromeda Biotech has fewer than 10 employees, the operation behind getting DiaPep277 into the marketplace involves hundreds of people, from the testing centers on up the ladder to CBI, which owns of 84% of the company it founded in 2007 to develop and commercialize the peptide. Teva holds the remaining 16% of Andromeda.
The advanced study's steering committee is composed of doctors Itamar Raz, Hadassah Medical Center, Jerusalem; Paolo Pozzilli, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome; Thomas Linn, Universitätsklinikum Giessen, Germany; Francois Bonnici, New Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape town; and Philip Raskin, University of Texas South-western Medical Center at Dallas.
Though the Diabetic curing medicine DiaPep277 will come into the world market from 2014, it won't be available in a number of countries, including Bangladesh, as these countries continue travel ban on Israel and consider it as an "enemy state". Commenting on DiaPep277, editor of Weekly Blitz and international known award-winning journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury said, "this will be a huge bad news for almost 210 million diabetes patients in Bangladesh that they will be totally deprived of getting cured by using DiaPep277. Continuing the travel ban on Israel will actually mean playing with the lives of these 210 million Bangladeshi diabetes patients."
He said, "Israeli companies would be gladly agreed to supply the DiaPep277 to Bangladesh market at a very special price, should the Bangladeshi government immediately lift the unjust travel ban on Israel. It makes me feel very sad seeing the 210 million diabetes patients in Bangladesh will be completely deprived of the magical curative power of DiaPep277."