Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The discovery of an insulin-blocking enzyme may help scientists develop better treatments for the form of diabetes that affects more than 200 million people worldwide, researchers in Australia said.

Scientists at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney found mice genetically engineered without the enzyme didn't develop type-2 diabetes even after being fed a high-fat diet that made them resistant to insulin, the hormone that converts sugar to energy.

The discovery may lead to the development of a new class of drug that treats the underlying cause of diabetes by preserving the body's ability to produce insulin as it's needed, such as after meals, the institute said today in a statement. Current therapies stimulate the body to produce more insulin whether it's needed or not, which can exhaust the pancreas.

``There really is nothing at the moment that targets this particular gap in the armory of treatment of type-2 diabetes,'' said Trevor Biden, who led the research at the institute's diabetes signaling unit, in an interview.

In diabetes, sugar collects in patients' blood rather than being absorbed by muscle and fat cells, leading to kidney failure, blindness, heart disease, amputation and death. Type-2 diabetes results most frequently from obesity. Excess weight prevents sugar absorption, leading the pancreas to work harder and eventually destroying the organ.

Drug Development

By creating a drug that inhibits the insulin-blocking enzyme, known as PKCepsilon, scientists may be able to prevent type-2 diabetes progressing to the stage where sufferers become dependent on insulin injections or need transplants of the pancreatic islet cells that produce the hormone, Biden said. Such a medicine may be 10 years away, he said.

Biden and colleague Carsten Schmitz-Peiffer are talking to local and overseas pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies about developing such a drug. Biden declined to name the companies. A patent is pending for the research, on which the two scientists are named as inventors, he said.

Worldwide sales for diabetes drugs may bring in as much as $21.7 billion this year for their makers, according to a report published last month by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Companies including Novartis AG and Merck & Co. are competing to develop drugs that use the body's own mechanisms to control blood sugar.

Deaths from diabetes, which kills about 1.1 million each year, are forecast to increase more than 50 percent in the next decade, according to the World Health Organization.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 4, 2007 03:17 EDT