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A Cure In Sight?
Dear American Capitalist Reader,
One of the most significant strategic trends we follow is diabetes. It is a locomotive heading straight down the tracks, easily the most critical crisis facing global health and public policy authorities. A whopping 15 million Americans are diagnosed as diabetic, another six million have it but don't know it yet, and a further 45 million are pre-diabetic and will develop the disease within 10 to 15 years. Globally, the numbers are even more daunting, with 300 million diabetes expected worldwide by 2025, mostly in developing nations. Moreover, because of the long list of chronic complications from diabetes, like blindness, amputations and kidney disease, the condition is already the most expensive in the world to treat. And that is BEFORE the baby boomers have entered the prime 60+ age en masse. It is a very big problem, and it is going to get bigger.
That is, unless a cure is found.
Over the weekend, researchers in Canada may have just started down the road to curing, instead of treating, diabetes. In looking for reasons why a person's pancreas stops producing insulin, which regulates the amount of sugar carried in the blood, scientists at a Toronto hospital have discovered that the body's own nervous system may actually help trigger diabetes by blocking insulin-producing pancreatic cells with tight packets of pain neurons. In the study, diabetic mice became regular mice literally overnight after receiving a chemical that counteracts the effect of these malfunctioning pain neurons and allows pancreatic function to resume. Moreover, some of the mice have stayed that way for four months after just one injection, raising the possibility of an outright cure. The results were published in the journal Cell over the weekend, and have literally turned diabetes research on its ear.
To say this is huge would be like saying the Titanic hit an ice cube. If the link between these pain neurons and pancreatic insulin production holds true in humans, it could be the biggest breakthrough in diabetes history. And it couldn't come too soon - diabetes is already the fourth-leading cause of the death in the United States and costs an estimated $100 billion per year to treat.
A human medication is obviously still a ways off, but following this revelation every diabetes research company in the world is going to be looking at nerves in a whole new way. And you can bet the FDA will give a whole new meaning to the term "fast-track" should the connection be verified.
We follow diabetes as an investment trend very closely in Trend Investor and think we have a pretty good idea which companies are going to jump on this new information (they aren't the ones you might think). And the first one to market with a bona-fide drug that cures diabetes... well, I don't have to tell you what would happen to that company's stock.
Stay tuned,
Steven Lord, Editor, Trend Investor
