In this important podcast, Dr. Jeffrey Karp, Principal Investigator, Karp Lab (karplab.net), discusses diabetes treatment options, and the medical breakthroughs that are changing treatment protocols.

Dr. Karp focuses his attention on the areas of stem cell therapeutics, drug delivery, medical devices, and tissue adhesives. Dr. Karp is a Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Dr. Karp talks about his extensive background, starting out as a chemical engineer at McGill University, and continuing through his PhD work at the University of Toronto, and eventually MIT for his postdoc. Dr. Karp provides an overview of diabetes. He explains how it was in fact gastric bypass surgery patients who suffered from diabetes who provided the information doctors needed to further diabetes treatment. Remarkably, they found that gastric bypass surgery patients did not need medication for their type 2 diabetes after their surgeries. And this discovery motivated the medical science community to find a means of achieving the same response in a less invasive way.

Dr. Karp states that the pill they created, which is taken before meals, forms a transient coating that can limit the nutrient contact with the GI tract and thereby achieves similar benefits to the gastric bypass surgery.

Dr. Karp has published over 125 peer-reviewed papers, with 18,500+ citations, and he has been invited to give over 300 lectures on various medical science topics.

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