Redefining Diabetes Treatment
Leslee Nguyen's Journey in Diabetes Research.
I recently conducted an interview with Leslee Nguyen, a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate in Biochemistry at the Stanford School of Medicine. Leslee’s interest in science and diabetes stems from her aspirations to help patients and improve their quality of life. She was specifically interested in diabetes as her parents suffered from it, inspiring her to help people who were facing situations similar to theirs.
Diabetes is a chronic health condition that affects how one's body turns food into energy. Usually, your body breaks down most of the food you eat into glucose and releases it into the bloodstream. When your blood sugar goes up, it signals your pancreas to release more insulin. Insulin essentially lets the blood sugar into your body’s cells for it to be used as energy. With diabetes, your body does not make enough insulin or is unable to use it effectively. When there is a lack of insulin or cells stop responding to insulin, too much blood sugar stays in your bloodstream. Over time, this can cause serious health problems such as heart disease, vision loss, and kidney disease.
There are three main types of diabetes: type 1, type 2, and gestational diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is thought to be caused by an autoimmune reaction (the body attacks itself by mistake). This reaction stops your body from making insulin. Currently, no one knows how to prevent type 1 diabetes. With type 2 diabetes, cells don’t respond normally to insulin; this is called insulin resistance. While your pancreas initially tries to make more insulin to try to get cells to respond, it eventually can’t keep up, and your blood sugar rises, setting the stage for type 2 diabetes. About 90-95% of people with diabetes have type 2. Finally, gestational diabetes develops in pregnant women who have never had diabetes. During pregnancy, a woman's body makes more hormones and goes through other changes including weight gain. These changes cause your body’s cells to use insulin less effectively. Having gestational diabetes increases your risk for type 2 diabetes later in life. With an estimated 463 million people suffering from diabetes or diabetes related medical complications worldwide, Lesle’s work is critical in solving a global issue.
Currently, there are no long-term cures to diabetes, but rather, patients must regularly check their blood glucose levels and self-administer insulin. To overcome this challenge, Leslee hopes to develop a therapeutic candidate that tolerates the patient’s immune response to their own beta cells, specialized cells in the pancreas responsible for insulin production. During her studies, Leslee worked with mice in order to test her formulations. She split the mice into numerous groups, injecting various amounts of insulin into each group and injected her formulation into one group. She measured their blood glucose over time to assess how her formulation was faring in comparison to the standard treatment. Initially, Leslee’s experiment was not going as expected; the negative control mice were not developing diabetes. Leslee speculated that this was due to external stress, and so she changed the cage-blocking (i.e, the number of mice from each group per cage). She also adjusted the treatment groups to contain a different insulin. She further dosed the mice with a specific gel to improve their chances of not getting sick. In the end, Leslee found her preliminary data to support her original thesis that her formulation can lower blood glucose levels without requiring numerous shots. When asked how she plans on distributing her formulation once she finishes, Leslee is confident that her formulation will penetrate the market as people will feel inclined to take this instead of numerous insulin shots a day.
Ultimately, Leslee closed with advice to young and aspiring scientists by stating that “negative data is still data” and that not seeing results can give you insight on how to better conduct future experiments. She also mentioned that not everyone’s path to success in the science space has to be linear. Leslee pivoted between chemistry, biology, and neuroscience before discovering her passion for biochemistry. She did not take the traditional school path as she went from community college to UC Santa Cruz, after which she worked for several years before deciding to attend graduate school. Leslee’s journey teaches us that just because your path does not align with the traditional route does not mean that you will not achieve success. Success is defined by hard work and dedication to your craft, not how closely your path aligns with societal expectations.