- Diabetes Mellitus

Diabetes is a serious problem that costs our entire planet. Most people don’t realize that it is not only the world’s 4th leading cause of death, diabetes is increasing daily and now affects an estimated 246 million people globally. Diabetes is a condition where the amount of glucose in your blood is too high because the body cannot use it properly. This is because your pancreas does not produce any insulin, or not enough, to help glucose enter your body’s cells   or the insulin that is produced does not work properly (known as insulin resistance).

- What we are doing

POSTECH has the Aptamer technology which they can develop nucleic acid-binder to any specific targets with. The aptamer can be applied to various fields such as therapeutics, diagnosis, and etc, where antibody has been using, with the advantages of being chemically-synthesizable, and less immunogenicity. The POSTECH lab is developing aptamers to diabetic targets from previous research of Berggren group including insulin receptors (in subtype specific manners), Apolipoprotein C-III, and VDCC beta subunit.

The aptamers are being developed to drug candidates for diabetes by combination of Eye model and aptamer technology. The aptamers will be evaluated in the in vivomodel where islets with various biosensors were transplanted into anterior chamber of the eyes in terms of drug efficacy and in vivo signal transduction.