Umbilical Cord Cells Treatment with Metadichol® IRS Proteins and GLUT4 Expression and Implications for Diabetes

Insulin and IGF signaling require a family of scaffold proteins, also called as Insulin Receptor Substrate (IRS) proteins to integrate extracellular signals into intracellular responses, leading to cellular effects. Two main IRS proteins in humans are IRS1 and IRS2 and are widely expressed in most human and mammalian tissues. In this study, IRS1, IRS2, GLUT4 gene expression is quantified in Umbilical Cord (UC) cell line by semi quantitative- PCR. The internal control β-actin was used to normalize the IRS1, IRS2, GLUT4 gene expression levels. This is the first example of UC cells being induced by a ligand in expressing genes that regulate glucose and insulin levels. Metadichol® treatment at different concentrations on UC cells showed upregulation of IRS1, IRS2 and GLUT4. 100 pg/mL concentrations showed the highest upregulation of IRS1, IRS2 and GLUT4 expression. 1 ng and 100 ng/mL treatment showed marginal. Metadichol® is in addition a TNF alpha inhibitor and also inhibits Plasminogen Activation Inhibitor (PAI1) also known as SERPINE1. These genes play an important role in diabetes. The experimental results fully correlated with curated literature data using Bioinformatics software. Network analysis show the uniqueness of shared genes, IRS1, IRS2, GLUT4, TNF, PAI1, acting through multiple pathways that target multiple diseases.