today, diabetes is a global epidemic, with approximately 422 million cases worldwide and constitutes elevated blood glucose levels due to the inefficient use of insulin in the body. more than 5.7 million canadians are living with diagnosed diabetes (type 1 or type 2). in addition, 11.7 million canadians are living with diabetes or prediabetes, which, if left unmanaged, can develop into type 2 diabetes (t2d).
roughly half of the western medicines today derive from naturally occurring plant metabolites. plants produce over 200,000 of these specialized metabolites, but identifying medicinally useful ones is challenging, and obtaining sufficient quantities for human use poses an even more significant challenge.
modern agriculture and plant bioengineering can play an essential role in overcoming the challenge of an insufficient supply of plant metabolites. therefore biopharming will help utilize the largely undiscovered potential of specialized plant metabolism that may lead to new treatments for improving human health.
a promising new way to treat t2d
a few years ago, in an effort to produce a diabetes drug that explicitly inhibits human pancreatic amylase (hpa) activity without having unwanted gastrointestinal side effects, glyconet — a pan-canadian initiative bringing together researchers, industry and academic partners to develop solutions through the study of glycomics — and university of british columbia (ubc) scientists screened 30,000 extracts derived from plants and other organisms and found a single compound that fit the bill: montbretin a (mba). mba comes from the bulb-like underground corms of the ornamental plant montbretia (
crocosmia
x
crocosmiiflora
). this new anti-diabetic compound derived from a garden flower is approved by health canada for phase 1 human trials. it is also anticipated that the compound could be developed into a treatment for t2d with fewer side effects than other options currently available.