NISKAYUNA, NY – March 31, 2022 – Are we moving closer to the day when diabetes is no longer monitored and managed with blood sugar tests, insulin injections and drug treatments? A GE Research-led team, which includes The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, Yale School of Medicine, and Albany Medical College, has demonstrated the ability to prevent or reverse the onset of diabetes in studies of three different preclinical model systems. The team reported their findings in the latest issue of Nature Biomedical Engineering.

The reported findings represent a significant milestone in the field of bioelectronic medicine, which is exploring new ways to treat chronic diseases such as diabetes using electronic devices to modulate the body’s nervous system. For the past 6 years, GE Research has been a pioneer in ultrasound-based bioelectronic medicine, developing a novel, non-invasive stimulation technique that uses ultrasound to stimulate specific neural pathways within organs that are associated with disease. The diabetes studies reported in the Nature Biomedical Engineering article were supported in part by the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Christopher Puleo, a senior biomedical engineer at GE Research who co-led the diabetes studies and a corresponding author of the Nature Biomedical Engineering article, is excited about the progress that the team has made to demonstrate this potential new treatment for diabetes, stating, “We have shown that ultrasound can be used to prevent or reverse diabetes in these preclinical studies. We’re now in the midst of human feasibility trials with a group of Type-2 diabetic subjects, which begins our work toward clinical translation.”
“The use of ultrasound could be a game-changer in how bioelectronic medicines are used and applied to disease, such as Type- 2 diabetes, in the future,” Puleo added. “Non-pharmaceutical and device-based methods to augment or replace the current drug-treatments may add a new therapeutic choice for physicians and patients in the future.”

From the onset of these diabetes studies, this has been a truly collaborative team effort among all the partners to achieve the extraordinary progress made to date. From the first GE studies showing initial results using ultrasound-prototype devices with diabetic models; the work then expanded through a DARPA-funded program. This was followed by additional work at partner sites investigating: The specific ion channels associated with the ultrasound effect within in vitro cultures (UCLA Samueli School of Engineering; Di Carlo Lab); the direct effects of ultrasound stimulation on nerve activity using recording electrodes (Albany Medical College; Shin Lab); testing the ultrasound treatment effect in a second and third models (Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research (FIMR); Chavan and S. Zanos Labs); and the magnitude of the effect on blood glucose using quantitative glucose clamp methods (Yale School of Medicine; Herzog Lab, and FIMR; S. Zanos Lab).

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