This exciting project is looking at another species to develop new type 2 diabetes treatments.

Could Australia’s echidnas and platypuses hold the key to new treatments for people with type 2 diabetes? Professor Briony Forbes, head of Medical Biochemistry and Cell Biology and deputy director of research education development at Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute, is working on a research project with a difference.

“It’s really unusual to draw on different species to get ideas about how we might treat diabetes,” she says. “This project is a collaboration with geneticists who are involved in understanding how monotremes like the platypus and echidna control their metabolism.”

Monotremes are a group of highly specialised egg-laying predatory mammals made up of just five living species: the platypus and four species of echidnas.

GLP-1 peptides

Professor Forbes says that, like humans, monotremes produce a peptide that stimulates the body to produce insulin after a meal. “A peptide is a very small protein that can circulate in the body and then work on particular target organs,” she explains. “In this case, the peptide, glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), works on the pancreas to stimulate the production of insulin.”

However, while both humans and monotremes produce this GLP-1 peptide, Professor Forbes’s team and the geneticists noticed that in monotremes, the peptide doesn’t rapidly degrade the way it does in humans.

The GLP-1 peptide is also found in the echidna’s venom, so Professor Forbes’s team have been able to replicate this peptide in the lab and apply it to mice to see whether it has any beneficial effects.

Through a one-year Diabetes Australia Research Program grant, her team have been able to test the peptide’s effect on lowering blood glucose levels and on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, one of the complications of type 2 diabetes. “We’ve got some really exciting preliminary data to suggest that these peptides are working very well,” says Professor Forbes. “We also think they are likely to have weight-loss benefits.”

The next step, which her team is already working on, is developing and testing second-generation peptides, which will hopefully eventually lead to a new treatment for people with type 2 diabetes.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is one of the many complications linked to type 2 diabetes. A build-up of fat in the liver, it appears to be linked to insulin resistance and can lead to liver scarring, or cirrhosis, and decreased liver function.

“The current treatments for type 2 diabetes address its complications to a certain extent, but problems still occur because of obesity and the inability to have good blood-glucose control,” says Professor Forbes. “There’s still a lot of work to be done in improving the treatments we have. I think type 2 diabetes requires multi-pronged approaches, including new therapies.”

She says the Diabetes Australia grant has been “enormously helpful”. “We were so appreciative because not only does it fund the research, it really gives us leverage with commercial industry. It also allows us to apply for larger grants and keeps our work turning over.”

Professor Forbes says this research is a unique project. “It allows you to look at things from left field and come up with new ideas. It’s so exciting because we’re taking clues from a completely different species to come up with novel ways to develop treatments.”