Attention, shoppers: The latest blue light special could help combat diabetes and some genetic diseases.
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Scientists have harnessed a light-gathering protein usually found in the eye to turn on the production of a protein that controls blood sugar. Researchers in Switzerland and France rigged kidney cells to make the blood-sugar control protein when exposed to blue light and then implanted diabetic mice with tiny capsules containing the engineered cells. Shining a blue light directly on the mice’s skin or through an implanted optical fiber brought blood sugar levels back to normal, the team reports in the June 24 Science.
Other researchers have switched nerve cells on and off with light-activated proteins (SN: 1/30/10, p. 18), but this is the first time such a system has tackled a metabolic disease in a mammal, says Edward Boyden, a neuroengineer at MIT who was not involved with the study. “They offered a compelling clinical demonstration that you can change the physiological state of an organism,” he says. “It leads to some powerful thinking about what this could lead to.”