Professor Potier is a leading name in medicinal chemistry having developed two anti-tumour drugs, synthesized from compounds isolated from natural products. His present research is into type II diabetes.
Diabetes is a metabolic disease to which the name Claude Bernard has been attached since the end of the 19th Century when this great physiologist conducted his famous experiments on this disease.
Professor Potier will report on the latest results obtained by his team in the study of this increasingly important disease (200 million patients all over the world, expected to double in the next ten years).
The importance of methylglyoxal (a metabolite of glucose) in the development of diabetes will be described. Its possible implications in the fields of Neurodegenerative diseases (autism, Alzheimers and Parkinsons etc), cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, infarctus will be discussed. And the possible primordial role of the gut flora will be evoked. It is perhaps not so surprising that methylgloxal may be considered to be a highly toxic universal poison as it is derived from glucose, a universal source of energy.
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