Traditional treatments for diabetes involve stimulating the insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas to work harder. Over time this results in cell burnout and the reduction in the number of the vital beta cells.
The novel approach being taken by Ulster University spin-out Dia Beta Labs instead focuses on preventing and reversing the loss of beta cells. Rather than forcing the cells to work harder, it allows them to rest, repairs damaged cells and stimulates the proliferation of new cells.
“My background is in community pharmacy,” says Dia Beta Labs chief executive Ryan Lafferty. “I had been doing that for a couple of years when I took a bit of a left turn. I got involved in a start-up company in Dundonald Hospital which was dealing with people with diabetes. That piqued my interest. I went back to Ulster University and did a research project on diabetes for my PhD.”
That saw him working with the diabetes research group based on Ulster University’s Coleraine campus. “In the course of my PhD I looked at therapies for type 2 diabetes and obesity. I looked at a specific hormone and how it interacts in the body and how to reverse engineer it to bring about positive impacts within the body. Halfway through my first postdoc the idea of a spin-out came about.”
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The company started life in the university’s iCure business accelerator which helps entrepreneurs take research from academia and make it commercially viable. “I went through a market validation process where I went out to industry and healthcare professionals to validate the idea. That helped whittle down the assets we had in the research group to three therapeutic assets. The research group has been running for 30 years; Dia Beta Labs was established last October. We raised stg£450,000 to progress work on bring the first therapeutic candidate to pre-clinical trial.”
A need for longer-lasting benefits
He explains that the problem with current therapies is that they only tend to work well for two or three years. “Patients discontinue them because of side effects or loss of therapeutic benefits in terms of blood glucose control. There is a clear gap for something with more long-lasting benefits; 80 per cent of treatment costs come about through side effects of diabetes like sight loss, amputations and so on. If we can repair the process and restore function it can have much longer lasting effects.”
The other main treatment is insulin therapy. “A lot of patients end up on that. But it is a difficult medication to take, particularly if the patient goes on it later in life.”
Investigations to date have produced data to support that the Dia Beta Labs therapeutic peptides will help patients to hold on to cell mass for much longer. “As diabetes progresses beta cells continue to die off and a patient can lose 70 per cent of the cell mass over 15 years. This is because the body tries to manage glucose levels and the only way it knows how to do it is by making the cells work harder.”
On the other hand, it has been shown that healthy patients can increase insulin production at times of high demand. “The pancreas is quite a plastic organ. One of the best examples of its responsiveness is pregnancy. The beta cell mass has been shown to expand in response to the increased demand placed on the pancreas.”
The potential to cure diabetes
That led the Ulster research team into some interesting areas. For example, there are ways to stimulate other cells to transform themselves into beta cells and there are ways to stimulate new cell formation.
“There is a complex interplay between the mechanisms, but they all contribute to increased cell mass,” Lafferty adds.
The aim is to develop a first-line treatment for type two diabetes. “Our ultimate goal is that the therapy does its job so well that the patient can eventually cease taking it. This will lead to recognition of diabetes as a condition that can be cured as opposed to just managed.”
He describes the journey to this point as incredibly long with the research group dating back three decades and his own PhD going back more than six years ago. “We hope to have our first-in-human trial in 2025 and to have a treatment on the market by 2030.”
Lafferty explains that the company will likely need a development partner from the pharmaceutical industry to bring the therapy to clinical trial. “The big multinational pharma companies have the chequebooks to take new therapies through the later stages of development and bring them to market. They want them to be significantly de-risked before they invest. A lot of the major pharma companies have been restructuring and downsizing their R&D divisions. They are partnering with smaller organisations instead. The nature of the game now is that small companies are going to the major pharma companies asking them to partner with them. We have been speaking to potential partners already.”