TUESDAY, Aug. 20, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Toxin from one of the most venomous animals on the planet – a deadly sea snail – could help researchers figure out new ways to treat diabetes and other hormone disorders, a new study suggests. A toxin in the venom of the geography cone snail mimics a human hormone called somatostatin, which regulates levels of blood sugar and hormones in the body, researchers reported Aug.
20 in the journal Nature Communications . This snail toxin, called consomatin, could help scientists design better drugs for people with diabetes or hormone disorders, researchers argue. “Cone snails are just really good chemists,” quipped lead author Ho Yan Yeung , a postdoctoral researcher in biochemistry at the University of Utah.
Consomatin works with another insulin-like toxin in the snail’s venom to produce a rapid and sustained decline in blood sugar levels that renders prey unconscious. “Venomous animals have, through evolution, fine-tuned venom components to hit a particular target in the prey and disrupt it,” explained senior researcher Helena Safavi , an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah. “If you take one individual component out of the venom mixture and look at how it disrupts normal physiology, that pathway is often really relevant in disease.
” For medicinal chemists, “it’s a bit of a shortcut,” Safavi said in a university news release. Somatostatin acts like a brake for many processes in the human bo.