Blind Cave Fish May Hold Secret to Treating Diabetes
These eyeless fish have insatiable appetites and high blood sugar. Scientists are trying to figure out how they're in such good health.
To learn about human diabetes, a disease that affects nearly 30 million people in the U.S. alone, a blind fish living in dark Mexican caves might not be the first creature to come to mind.
But researchers at Harvard are studying the fat little fish to learn how they may combat the condition in people.
The findings, recently published in the journal Nature, show the fish is uniquely adapted to regulating its blood sugar.
"We don't know if studying the fish will directly help us, but evolution has tried a lot of gene variants over millions of years and I think that's smarter than anything we can come up with, even with machine learning. I think it would be silly not