Students win award for creating model for type 2 diabetes

Hyderabad: Reagene Innovations Pvt Ltd, a start-up Company incubated at Aspire- BioNest incubation Center at University of Hyderabad (UoH) Campus won two first prizes for poster presentation at the 5th Annual Conference of Society for Alternatives to Animal Experimentation Annual meeting at Trivandrum for their presentation on First Fully Integrated 3D bioprinted human like Model for Type 2 Diabetes.

The presentation was made by the young scientist Saranya K with Arpitha Reddy RN and Sanjana Battula. Type 2 diabetes is the world's most prevalent chronic disease and often described as the silent killer. There are many drugs available for this disease yet patients are not able to maintain healthy levels of blood glucose. Safer and better drugs are needed. Reagene Innovations developed a 3D bioprinted human like model in the lab which simulated human type 2 diabetes. Using this model, they were able to design an over-the-counter anti-diabetic nutraceutical which shows significant blood glucose lowering in early patient studies.

Dr Uday Saxena, CEO of Reagene Innovations who led the initiative, said "the human-like model of type 2 diabetes we developed enabled bringing new treatment to patients swiftly in a very short period".

Dr Subrahmanyam Vangala, scientific Co-Founder said that the pharma world is rapidly moving towards using such new breakthrough models for drug discovery and development.

Dr Satishchandran, CEO of Prodigy Inc, USA, a business partner of Reagene said that finding faster pathways to discover new medicines will greatly improve pharma industry efficiency.