How is the method developed by UBA scientists to treat growth hormone deficiency, the disease Messi had

There growth hormone deficiency it’s a disease Who affects one in 4,000 children. This hormone is a vital substance in the body for the normal development of the body and in some cases it happens that the pituitary gland does not produce enough, generating a issue for people’s present and future. An emblematic case of this photo was that of the Argentine soccer star, Lionel Messiwho at the age of 10 was 1.25 meters tall.

He treatment to which the athlete had to submit consisted of daily subcutaneous injections for at least three years to correct deficit growing. It is that in general, the approaches to this condition are very intrusive and complex. However, at present, researchers from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) they seek to make them more effective and less intrusive. How? apply nanotechnology with tiny components like atoms, viruses and cells to achieve the controlled release of the aforementioned hormone over longer periods of time. One of the main advantages of this advancement is that it allows you to avoid daily injections.

in this tone, Paul Catalano, professor and researcher at UBA’s Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, explained: “Using nanoscale particles of a material called silica, together with another material called collagen, both of which are biocompatible, we seek to develop a system that allows the hormone to be housed in growth, protect it and release it gradually”. In this context, the patient would inject once a week or every 15 days.

According to the specialist, they propose with his team “a system based on nanostructured biomaterials which allows a controlled and continuous release of the hormone and which avoids its daily administration. This would lead to greater patient compliance with treatment, radically improving its effectiveness.”

“Our investigations focus on biocompatible nanostructured materials. They are nanoscale materials which, given their chemical composition and structure, are compatible or friendly to living beings. In our particular case, this is critical as we seek to develop systems that can provide better alternatives to current treatments for human growth hormone deficiencies,” remarked Catalano.

At 10, Messi was 1.25 meters tall, a size corresponding to a young man two years his junior. It was the Argentinian endocrinologist Diego Schwarzstein who diagnosed him with growth hormone deficiency.

The crisis in Argentina in 2001 made it difficult to pay for healthcare in the country and, at the age of 13, she arrived with her family in Barcelona, ​​Spain. Back then, Messi’s growth projection was 7 to 15 centimeters (cm) maximum. If he had stopped and responded adequately to the treatment he was receiving, the Argentine could have been between 1.50 and 1.58cm tall, seven units shorter than Diego Maradona, who was already considered a very small player despite being the best in the world. .

The Catalan club’s idea was to make Messi reach 1.70 meters and stop being ‘La Pulga’, as he was nicknamed. It was about gaining 27 cm in just three years, because at 16, injections had to be stopped. He was very close to the goal: currently the captain of the Argentine national team is 1.69 meters tall and we all know the end of the story.

There are drugs that must be administered at very precise times, with complex dosages, associated with other therapies and other requirements that, with the help of nanotechnology, can work more easily and more effectively. “Nanobiotechnology is the scientific discipline that deals with the study and development of very small-scale systems, which we call nanometric, to be applied in multiple branches of biology and medicine. In the lab, we are dedicated to applying nanotechnology to solve biomedical problems,” explained Catalano.

And he added: “At the nanoscale, matter has distinctive and interesting properties that are useful for further studying biological systems, for developing better diagnostic systems or for improving current treatments for chronic diseases, among others.

Secondly, Catalano, who is also a researcher at the Institute of Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies (INN), Constituents node (CNEA-CONICET), clarified: “Hormones are very powerful compounds, that is to say that with a small amount, you get a lot of “effect, and said effect is strongly related to the time of administration of it. In the particular case of growth hormone, the treatment of its deficiency involves its chronic administration and there are currently devices which require daily injections of the hormone. This constitutes a serious disadvantage for the observance of the treatment by the patients”.

In this context, materials can be produced, manipulated and studied at different scales. At the nanometer scale, materials have different physical and chemical properties that are not observed at other scales. This is why scientists choose to work on this scale, when it comes to fighting against certain deficiencies in our organism.

“A nanometer corresponds to one billionth of a meter”, explains the researcher. And he concluded: “To make it more graphic, a nanometer would result from dividing the thickness of a human hair into 50,000 parts. The materials that we call nanostructured adopt different shapes and configurations (spheres, tubes, rods, tips, sponges, among others) always on a scale between 1 and hundreds of nanometers”.

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