A potential new treatment approach for complications relating to diabetes has been described today in the open-access eLife journal.
Diabetes is a serious condition that causes the blood sugar level to become too high. In patients with diabetes, the overproduction of cellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) – highly reactive chemicals formed from oxygen – can lead to severe tissue damage. The new study suggests that the repression of a protein complex called hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1) contributes to this overproduction of ROS, and is therefore an attractive therapeutic target.
“Hypoxia, a condition where oxygen levels drop in our tissues, has also recently been identified as a harmful player in diabetes,” explains Xiao-Wei Zheng, Senior Lab Manager at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, and a co-first author of the study alongside Sampath Narayanan and Cheng Xu, also from Karolinska Institutet. “In our study, we wanted to find out if the overproduction of cellular ROS in diabetes is caused by impaired responses to hypoxia due to the inhibition of HIF-1 by high blood sugar levels.”
Read more at: https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/5332215d/study-identifies-potential-new-approach-for-treating-diabetes-complications