Currently, few preventative therapies are available on the market for public consumption.
According to the National Institute of Health, "a number of therapies are approved for type 2 diabetes, [but] none can reverse disease progression over the long term or prevent complications of the disease."
Drug therapies preventing type 2 diabetes would greatly impact the 79 million high-risk, pre-diabetes adults living in the United States. It is unclear whether the hypothesized drug therapy would help the 382 million people already suffering from the disease worldwide.
Flannik warns that determining the viability of creating new drug therapies "will require years, maybe decades of research.”
Multiple universities, hospitals, as well as a pharmaceutical company, Pfizer Inc., collaborated with the Broad Institute in this study.