So long as pastes the "medicinal plaster" on the skin, while do not need to give an injection or take the medicine, the symptom of the diabetes patients will be eased. Perhaps the above issue is no longer a dream. Recently, the research team led by Prof. Wen Longping, which is from USTC Life Sciences School, takes advantage of biological technology to discover a skin-penetrating peptide which can carry insulin to enter the human's body through skin. It provides the doctors a simple medicine-applying method for the patients. USA Nature Biological Technology publishes this magnificent research result on 23rd, March.

Diabetes is the major disease which harms the human health. According to the estimates of World Health Organization, there are 135 million diabetes patients in the world, 40 million in China. In the majority of diabetes patients' bodies, the insulin lacks relatively, even absolutely, so the treatment to them is to inject the insulin several times everyday, bringing the huge pains to patients.

To apply the medicines through the skin is the way to force the skin to absorb the medicine; it has many special advantages, comparing with those traditional methods, such as injection and taking the medicine. This new method particularly fits to diabetes patients who need to have medicines repeatedly every day. However, majority of medicine elements can not enter the skin, the human's natural barrier, especially the medicine with large water affinity elements, such as insulin. For many years, scientists have developed a large number of researches by chemosmosis promoter and physics-aided with the purpose of overcoming the skin barrier to realizing the medicine-applying through the skin. But both methods have various shortcomings, like causing the skin allergy easily, high costs, needing the special instruments. Considering of the above factors, to find a new skin-penetrating intensifier to overcome these defeats is the dream of many researchers.

Prof. Wen Longping leads the team to creatively apply the molecular biology technology to do research, and successfully finds the short peptide which can effectively help the protein-class medicines to pass the skin. The editors of Natural Biological Technology regard this research result as an attractive achievement which reveals a new strategy to transfer the large elements to enter the skin.

Prof. Wen Longping introduces that the research was developed in mice, so whether the skin-penetrating peptide can be used in humans are still unknown. Currently the research team led by him cooperates with a Shanghai-based medicine technology company to carry out the clinical studies, striving for entering the human body experiments step as soon as possible.