What if the next breakthrough in diabetes treatment isn't necessarily a new drug molecule, but a better way to deliver the drugs we already have? One biotechnology company is developing a platform designed to target the liver with insulin - and exploring whether the same principle could eventually apply to GLP-1 and other metabolic therapies. Today, we're exploring the science, the clinical evidence, and what still needs to be proven.
Robert Geho is Co-Founder and CEO of Diasome Pharmaceuticals ( https://diasome.com/ ), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing a fundamentally different approach to treating metabolic disease: instead of simply changing how much medicine reaches the bloodstream, what if we could change where that medicine goes in the body?
Robert has spent more than three decades working at the intersection of diabetes, drug delivery, entrepreneurship and biotechnology. After being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes while in business school, he shifted the direction of his career toward developing better therapies for people living with the disease.
Robert co-founded AMDG, where his team helped conduct an early successful human clinical study of nanotechnology-based, liver-targeted insulin, and in 2004 he co-founded Diasome. The company's proprietary Hepatocyte-Directed Vesicle, or HDV, platform is designed to direct therapeutic molecules toward liver cells and the portal-hepatic region - an area that plays a central role in normal metabolic regulation.
Today, Diasome's lead program is HDV-Insulin, an approach designed to restore more of the liver's natural role in insulin action and potentially reduce one of the most persistent challenges of intensive insulin therapy: hypoglycemia.
And this is where Robert's story becomes particularly personal. He isn't simply developing diabetes therapeutics - he has lived with Type 1 diabetes for more than two decades.
Most recently, Diasome reported results from its 226-person Phase 2b OPTI-2 trial. The study found that HDV-insulin lispro maintained glycemic control while producing statistically significant reductions in several CGM-measured hypoglycemia endpoints during the maintenance period; notably, no Level 3 severe hypoglycemic events occurred in the HDV-insulin group compared with five in the standard insulin group.
Today we're going to step back and ask a fascinating question: Have we been thinking about insulin delivery incorrectly - and could directing insulin to the liver change the way we treat diabetes and, eventually, other metabolic diseases?
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