BIO5 and Biodesign Institute seek early detection of Type 2 diabetes

[Source: University of Arizona Communications] -- A new team of researchers from The University of Arizona and Arizona State University is taking aim at the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States: adult-onset, or type 2, diabetes. The coalition’s goal is to learn how to predict who will develop the disease long before any symptoms appear. “Right now,” says Serrine Lau, professor at UA’s College of Pharmacy and member of the BIO5 Institute, “current indicators, biomarkers, of type 2 diabetes are not well defined and most such markers are only reliably detected in people who have already been diagnosed with the disease. Finding these clues, which will allow for the early treatment and possible avoidance of the complications associated with the disease, is the goal of our research.”

Lau spearheads the team’s investigation using cutting-edge technologies to discover and validate new biomarkers to accurately detect pre-type 2 diabetes. It is a collaborative project between UA’s BIO5 Institute and ASU’s Biodesign Institute, supported by the Technology and Research Initiative Fund, known as TRIF. TRIF is a special investment in higher education made possible by passage of state Proposition 301 in November 2000.

The principal researchers on the project include UA’s Serrine Lau, George Tsaprailis and Craig Stump; Randy Nelson and Mike Mobley from ASU’s Biodesign Institute and ASU West Kinesiology Professor Larry Mandarino. “Our project is unique in the country,” says Lau. “First, collaborations between our two groups of experts enable us to combine exceptional intellectual and technological resources to address the problem. Second, we are conducting a highly targeted discovery investigation, which is guided by very well-defined clinical protocol. Third, we have a broader patient sample. Similar projects elsewhere are investigating patients who have already been diagnosed with diabetes, but we are looking at a more random sample of the population, and trying to learn how to predict who will develop diabetes.”

“We have the technologies and tools in place now to construct a detailed molecular signature of diabetes,” said Randy Nelson, who heads the Molecular Biosignatures Analysis Unit at ASU’s Biodesign Institute. “By studying the changes in both the expression and structure of proteins related to diabetes, we can determine their contribution to the disease process.”

Nelson is an expert in proteomics, a scientific discipline that studies changes in protein composition – generally in biofluids such as blood and urine – and how these changes relate to disease. “With the completion of the human genome project,” says Lau, “we now understand that genomics alone is insufficient to fully understand cellular biochemistry. It is the proteins which are the workhorses in regulating biological events.”

Researchers use state-of-the-art technology including protein sequencing by mass spectrometer, an instrument used to determine the composition of a physical sample by generating a spectrum representing the masses of sample components. The BIO5/Biodesign team uses mass spectrometers not only to identify proteins and their functional states, but also to measure the quantity of particular proteins. For example, someone with a disease may be producing too much of a given protein that would normally be present in lower amounts in a healthy individual. “As a clinician treating diabetes, this research is particularly exciting,” said another study participant, Craig Stump, MD, chief of the section of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Hypertension at the UA College of Medicine. “We’ve always used a shotgun approach to preventing diabetes – we know we have been overtreating some people, and undertreating others. Knowing a patient’s individual risk for diabetes will allow physicians to offer highly specific recommendations to avert the disease. It’s going to change lives.”

“The investigation is challenging, overarching and sometimes it can be intimidating,” continues Lau. “But we now realize that it is the path we have to take. It is essential that we approach this in a cooperative and global manner.”