Let’s explore diabetes with snakes

Originally from Southeast Asia, Burmese pythons are perhaps best known in the U.S. for the havoc they’ve been creating in the Everglades. Kept as pets and released into the wild, they can grow to nearly 20 feet long, and are hunting animals like marsh rabbits toward extinction (a problem Florida is trying to address with an annual Python Removal Competition).

But in the lab, at a diminutive 3 feet in length, Burmese pythons may hold valuable lessons about diabetes.

Extreme metabolism

Burmese pythons are capable of going four to six weeks between meals. When they do eat, their biology undergoes an extreme makeover. Cells in their gastrointestinal tract multiply rapidly, growing the intestine to six times its normal size within three days. Metabolism ramps up, boosting consumption of glucose and other fuels. Then everything goes back to baseline.

This unusual metabolism is what interested endocrinology researcher Nick Stylopoulos, MD. In 2013, he had published a highly reported diabetes study in Science. It showed, in a rat model, that bariatric surgery causes the small intestine to take up and burn blood sugar.

The unexpected sugar uptake is shown by this PET scan of the intestines (note the increased yellow and orange in the rat on the right). It seemed to explain why type 2 diabetes rapidly resolves in people undergoing bariatric surgery for obesity, even before they lose much weight. The study also found increased levels of a glucose transporter molecule that draws sugar out of the blood.

Based on these findings, Stylopoulos proposed that it might be possible to lower blood sugar in people with diabetes by focusing on the intestine — an organ no one had thought of as a target in the past.

Read the full post on Vector: Could Burmese pythons shed light on diabetes?

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