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 Health & Beauty | September 2007 
Gila Monster Spit Can Help Diabetics Regulate Their Blood Sugar
 Clay Thompson - azcentral.com
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| | Gila monsters are very unusual animals. For one thing, they are one of only two venomous lizards in the world. |
Today's question:
I have recently been prescribed a medicine called Byetta to assist in lowering my blood sugar. (I am a diabetic). Here's the Arizona link: This medicine is made from the saliva of Gila monsters. My question is, who came up with this concept? Did Gila monster-bite victims routinely exhibit hypoglycemia? What medical research led to my having to inject myself twice daily with lizard spit?
Lizard spit. That was elegantly put.
Gila monsters are very unusual animals. For one thing, they are one of only two venomous lizards in the world. The other is the Mexican beaded lizard.
They can eat 50 percent of their body weight in one sitting and then go for months before their next meal. And that's what brought them to the attention of diabetes researchers.
They can go all that time without eating without their blood sugar getting too low. Then when they do eat, the blood sugar doesn't go up a lot.
And people who are bitten by venomous snakes or reptiles often end up with inflammation of the pancreas, and it's your pancreas that churns out insulin, which controls blood sugar.
So in the early 1990s, a Veterans Administration endocrinologist named Dr. John Eng started studying dried Gila monster saliva. He found it contained a hormone he called exendin-4. It was very similar to peptide 1, which regulates glucose, but doesn't work very well as a drug.
Anyway, Eng figured out a way to synthesize this stuff so he wouldn't have to go around getting Gila monsters to spit in a cup all the time.
He patented the stuff, and in 2005 Byetta, a product of Amylin Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly, got its final approval from the U.S. Food and Drug administration.
It is for use in treated Type 2 diabetes, which is the kind most diabetics have.
I stole a lot of this information from some stories my esteemed colleague Connie Midey did in September 2006.
Reach Thompson at clay.thompson@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8612. |
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