Hope for Diabetics

The nation's 1,000,000 or more diabetics, often disappointed in their hopes for a pill to free them from insulin injections, heard good news last week. Doctors in 50 medical centers are trying out two drugs developed in Germany, and first reports are that they may succeed in regulating the blood sugar in about 80% of diabetes victims--mostly adults with a relatively mild and stable form of the disease.

The Upjohn Co., which is making one of the drugs under the name Orinase, circularized 200,000 U.S. doctors with a double warning: 1) it is too early to be sure how effective the pills will be; 2) they are not yet available for general prescription. But President E. Gifford Upjohn (an M.D. himself) suggested that "a breakthrough may have occurred." Western Reserve University's Dr. Max Miller hailed the drugs* "the most significant development in diabetes since Banting and Best discovered insulin."

Diabetes is a complex disorder in which the body cannot convert as much sugar into energy as it should because for this purpose it needs insulin, produced in the pancreas. In the diabetic, the pancreas may not produce enough insulin. Or, according to Pittsburgh University's Dr. I. Arthur Mirsky, it may produce enough, only to have it destroyed by insulinase, an enzyme made by the liver. Injections of insulin, which have prolonged and saved countless lives for 33 years, simply supply outside insulin. A more logical treatment, Dr. Mirsky thinks, would be to block the insulinase. Both the new drugs--close kin to the sulfa drugs--work by poisoning the insulinase.

Says Dr. Mirsky by way of warning: "Anything which poisons one substance in the body may also poison others. Only time will tell whether these compounds can safely be taken indefinitely." But Mirsky predicted that within a couple of years, drugs taken by mouth will control diabetes safely and effectively.

* Orinase was originally known as 0-2043. Eli Lilly & Co. is working on BZ-55, not yet commercially named.

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