Dealing with diabetes could soon be a lot easier as researchers have developed an injection that can restore blood sugar levels to normal for more than two days without any side effects.
In mice with diet-induced diabetes - the equivalent of type-2 diabetes in humans - a single injection of the protein FGF1 was found enough to control blood sugar levels.
"FGF1 offers a new method to control glucose in a powerful and unexpected way," said Ronald Evans from Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the US.
The discovery could lead to a new generation of safer, more effective diabetes drugs.
Sustained treatment with the protein does not merely keep blood sugar under control, but also reverses insulin insensitivity, the underlying physiological cause of diabetes, the findings showed.
Equally exciting, the newly developed treatment did not result in side effects common to most current diabetes treatments.
For the study, researchers injected doses of FGF1 into obese mice with diabetes to assess the protein's potential impact on metabolism.
They found that with a single dose, blood sugar levels quickly dropped to normal levels in all the diabetic mice.
"Many previous studies that injected FGF1 showed no effect on healthy mice," said Michael Downes, a senior staff scientist at Salk Institute.
"However, when we injected it into a diabetic mouse, we saw a dramatic improvement in glucose levels," Downes added.
The study appeared in the journal Nature.