RSC Blog

Not good news for diabetic vampires, but for non-porphyric sufferers a potential new drug to treat both diabetes types I and II has been discovered.

Garlic: the saviour for diabetics?

The new drug, based on allixin, a compound found in garlic, can be administered orally – perhaps as a tablet – and effectively lowers the blood glucose level of type 1 diabetic mice, the study has found.

Type 1 diabetics currently stick to a daily regime of self-injection with insulin, whereas type 2 diabetics are treated with oral drugs, sometimes leading to undesirable side-effects.

This is a great story from the first round of Advance Articles from our new journal, Metallomics, the first issue of which will be published next year.

The article itself, by Hiromu Sakurai and colleagues at the Suzuka University of Medical Science, Japan, is available free here.

Personally I wonder if a garlic-based drug would give you bad breath… any other opinions on this?

A great paper from UK chemists in Chem Comm: when working with polymers of S₂N₂, Paul Kelly and colleagues at Loughborough University found that the reaction was initiated by fingerprints. When they exposed a material to the chemical, it revealed any latent (invisible) fingerprints with a very low detection limit.

Perhaps my favourite bit, though, is that they tried to initiate the reaction using starting points other than fingerprints; they found that tiny residues of inkjet ink would show up brown as they started the polymerisation. Again, the limit is so low that they could even highlight the ink residues on the envelope a document had previously been in. With a bit of Photoshopping you could actually tell what text had been printed on the document, without ever seeing the original. Nifty eh? Here’s a sample:

With a bit of Photoshop and a bit of imagination...

For more detailed info read the Chemical Technology story posted recently.