Chinese team aims to put ‘smart’ diabetes probiotic on US shelves within 2 years

Chinese researchers have engineered a probiotic that could make diabetes care as simple as drinking a cup of yogurt or swallowing a capsule. The “smart” bacterium, designed to sense high blood sugar and automatically release a glucose-lowering hormone, performed on par with the blockbuster drug Ozempic in animal tests, according to a study published in Nature last week. The team at Shanghai’s East China Normal University has already filed patents and is now scaling up production to meet pharmaceutical standards for the US and European markets.