Diabetes Discoveries – Professor Jeffrey M. Karp, Principal Investigator, Karp Lab – Reversing Diabetes? An Amazing New Breakthrough

Professor Jeffrey M Karp, Principal Investigator, Karp Lab (karplab.net), provides an overview of the current state of diabetes treatment.

Dr. Karp is a celebrated Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Additionally, Dr. Karp is a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, as well as an affiliate faculty member at the Broad Institute and with the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Dr. Karp specializes in the fields pertaining to drug delivery, stem cell therapeutics, medical devices, and tissue adhesives.

Dr. Karp discusses his background, from his early undergrad training as a chemical engineer at McGill University, a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to his PhD work at the University of Toronto, continuing with a postdoc at MIT. The research doctor discusses diabetes in detail, and the incredible resources that are needed for this one medical condition. He talks about some amazing discoveries made through gastric bypass surgeries, and how doctors quickly acknowledged that many of their gastric bypass surgery patients no longer needed medication for their type 2 diabetes after the procedure.

Dr. Karp talks about the medical community's mission thereafter, to achieve the same response in a more minimally-invasive way.

The solution—a pill. Dr. Karp discusses the immense work that got the medical community through the research and to the solution. As he states, the pill they've created, which is taken before a meal, forms a transient coating that can limit nutrient absorption, effectively limiting the nutrient contact with the GI tract and thus mimicking the effects achieved earlier through the gastric bypass surgery.

Dr. Karp continues by explaining some of the treatments for weight loss and diabetes, and he expounds upon their progress getting their research into the clinical trial stage. Dr. Karp has published more than 125 peer-reviewed papers, with greater than 18,500 citations, and he has given over 300 lectures on topics within his areas of expertise. And Dr. Karp has 100+ already issued or pending patents (national and international).