Over 100 million people in the US either have type 2 diabetes or are at a high risk of developing it. In both his personal and professional life, Dr. Ali Tavakkoli has come to understand all too well the disease of diabetes and what it can do to the body over time. But as a minimally invasive and bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Tavakkoli began noticing a trend among almost all diabetic patients who’d undergone gastric bypass surgery: within no more than two days following the surgery, patients who had been entirely dependent upon medication to regulate their blood sugar were going home without any medication at all: their diabetic states had resolved.

Dr. Tavakkoli began doing research to understand the mechanism underlying this effect, and he wanted to know whether or not this understanding might allow him to determine a way of achieving the effects of surgery without the surgery itself. This search led him to where he is now: a member of the team that’s developing a type 2 diabetes treatment in the form of a pill that will provide patients with a transient coating of the proximal bowel, thereby mimicking a key outcome of the gastric bypass surgery. The compound is called LuCI, and Dr. Tavakkoli joins the conversation to tell us all about it.

On this episode, you will learn:

• How exactly a gastric bypass surgery is performed
• Why and how gastric bypass surgery seems to cure type 2 diabetes
• Why only 1-2% of people who qualify for gastric bypass surgery end up actually undergoing the surgery (and how LuCI could provide a solution)

Press play to hear the full conversation.

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