Flying Foxes Might Be Able to Help Humans Treat Diabetes

According to data from the CDC, as of 2021 approximately 11.6% of the U.S. population had diabetes — including 14.7% of the nation’s adults. It’s not surprising, then, that scientists are on the hunt for ways to help people treat and control the disease. And evidently, one of the ways they’re doing that involves researching bats. Specifically, the flying mammals known as flying foxes or fruit bats. (The latter is not to be confused with the long-running indie rock band of the same name.)

As NPR’s Ari Daniel reports, there’s a very good reason for this course of study. Flying foxes, you see, subsist on a diet of fruit. For most people, eating nothing but sugary foods would likely lead to a diabetes diagnosis down the line. For flying foxes, though, it’s part of a healthy everyday diet. This has led some scientists to speculate that fruit bats may well hold the secret to managing diabetes in humans.

“How can they handle [sugar] without acquiring some sort of metabolic disease?” Menlo College’s Wei Gordon told NPR. In collaboration with Nadav Ahituv of the University of California San Francisco, Gordon has been comparing the biology of fruit-eating bats and their insect-eating counterparts. Daniel reports that Gordon and Ahituv have found evidence that fruit bats have more cells that regulate blood sugar in their kidney and pancreas than insectivorous bats.

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“[A]lthough fruit bats consume more sugar than non-frugivorous bats, they can lower their blood sugar faster,” Gordon and Ahituv wrote in a paper published earlier this month in Nature Communications. That, in turn, means that there may be applications for treating multiple conditions in humans.

The paper’s authors went on to write that their findings “can inform potential therapeutic targets for human disease, particularly hypertension, hyperkalemia and diabetes.” Bats may not seem like the key to human health, and yet — they might just be the reason for a health science breakthrough.