Development of a Highly Visual, Simple, and Rapid Test for the Discovery of Novel Insulin Mimetics in Living Vertebrates

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

<P>Diabetes mellitus is a global epidemic with major impacts on human health and society. Drug discovery for diabetes can be facilitated by the development of a rapid, vertebrate-based screen for identifying new insulin mimetic compounds. Our study describes the first development of a zebrafish-based system based on direct monitoring of glucose flux and validated for identifying novel anti-diabetic drugs. Our system utilizes a fluorescent-tagged glucose probe in an experimentally convenient 96-well plate format. To validate our new system, we identified compounds that can induce glucose uptake via activity-guided fractionation of the inner shell from the Japanese Chestnut (<I>Castanea crenata</I>). The best performing compound, UP3.2, was identified as fraxidin and validated as a novel insulin mimetic using a mammalian adipocyte system. Additional screening using sets of saponin- and triazine-based compounds was undertaken to further validate this assay, which led to the discovery of triazine PP-II-A03 as a novel insulin mimetic. Moreover, we demonstrate that our zebrafish-based system allows concomitant toxicological analysis of anti-diabetic drug candidates. Thus, we have developed a rapid and inexpensive vertebrate model that can enhance diabetes drug discovery by preselecting hits from chemical library screens, before testing in relatively expensive rodent assays.</P><P><B>Graphic Abstract</B>
<IMG SRC='http://pubs.acs.org/appl/literatum/publisher/achs/journals/content/acbcct/2013/acbcct.2013.8.issue-8/cb4000162/production/images/medium/cb-2013-000162_0008.gif'></P><P><A href='http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/cb4000162'>ACS Electronic Supporting Info</A></P>