Insulin Delivery Systems for Controlling Diabetes

The goal of all drug delivery systems is to deploy medications intact to specifically targeted parts of the body through a medium that can control the therapy's administration by means of either a physiological or chemical trigger. The polypeptide insulin is the primary hormone responsible for controlling the transport, utilization and storage of glucose in the body. Due to the inconvenience of insulin injections, various approaches have been attempted to formulate insulin for administration by non-injectable routes. Different approaches to deliver insulin including transdermal, transmucosal, pulmonary route using dry aerosols and inhalers, smart hydrogels, nasal delivery, oral delivery, and treatment of diabetes with synthetic beta cells, has resulted in recent developments in treatment of diabetes. Among the latest patent approaches are delivering into the subject a genetic construct comprising a coding sequence for a human proinsulin operably connected a promoter functional in the host cells. Polypeptides having activity of human neurogenin3 (hNgn3), and nucleic acid encoding such polypeptide are among the other inventions that use of islet transcription factors such as hNgn3 to facilitate production of pancreatic islet cells from progenitor cells, and to facilitate insulin delivery by production of islet cells so produced.