If you live with diabetes and hate your daily insulin injections, Freddie Mercury may one day be the answer to your troubles.

I’m serious! Researchers have been exploring alternatives to injecting insulin, and they may have landed on a wildly innovative approach that doesn’t involve needles at all.

Instead, it involves music. Specifically, music from the band Queen. You heard it here first: the diabetes therapy of the future may involve 70’s rock music. [♪ INTRO] At least 38 million individuals in the United States alone live with diabetes and many of them need insulin injections.

The hormone insulin is required for regulating blood sugar. In diabetes, either the pancreas stops producing enough insulin, or cells become resistant to the natural levels of insulin in the body. Scientists have synthesized this hormone, but the only reliable way to give it is through injection, which can be problematic for some, especially those with a needle phobia.

As a way of skirting the injection process altogether, researchers in Switzerland were investigating a way to get the body to release insulin on command. And in a 2023 paper, they reported a way to get cells to spit out a dose of insulin, using music as a sort of remote control. The reason you’d need to do this is because insulin tends to be required at specific times, like after a meal.

So if you’re not picking up and using a needle, you need some other precise way of getting insulin where and when you need it. They focused on pancreatic β cells, the cells responsible for making insulin in response to blood glucose levels. And they specifically worked with cells that had grown resistant to doing their job, to mimic the effects of diabetes.

The researchers genetically modified these cells to contain both an insulin-producing unit and a sound-responsive ion channel. Ion channels are proteins that are embedded in cell membranes and form a gateway for ions – that’s basically anything with a non-neutral electrical charge – to pass through the cell membrane. These channels are very specific and don’t just let any ion across.

The ions have to match specific criteria, like be a certain size, have a specific electric charge, or a specific chemical makeup in order for the ion channel to open up and let these ions through. Some ion channels also respond to an outside stimulus like touch or vibration. These ion channels do a lot of different things for cells, but one example is that a big whoosh of ions is a major part of what makes a neuron fire and pass a signal along.

In this case, the researchers identified an ion channel that responds to warping of the cell membrane it’s embedded in. Since sound is technically a wave of pressure, it can cause that warping and switch on the ion channel. This channel would allow calcium to enter the cell and trigger the release of insulin from the unit inside the cell.

They named these modified cells MUSICINS, with MUSIC being short for music-inducible cellular control. Guys, I know you needed something cool to put on the grant application, but this one’s a stretch. The researchers’ initial approach was to culture these fancy cells in a petri dish on top of a speaker that was playing music.

They tested several types of music and background noise, and found that not just any sound triggered the sound-responsive ion channel. While they were trying for a soothing classical melody, they found that music with a lot of low bass – like that found in rock music – worked best. More specifically, they identified Queen’s song “We Will Rock You” as a top candidate for triggering the same rate of insulin release as typically functioning pancreatic cells.

The next step was to put these same cells into mice and see if they performed as well inside a living organism. Mice with a mousey version of type 1 diabetes were implanted with the MUSICINS cells and exposed to low-bass acoustic music. Even though they had a few options, the researchers went ahead with “We Will Rock You” because presumably they have great taste in music.

The mice that received this treatment achieved near-typical blood sugar levels after one 15-minute music session a day. The sound waves had to be directed at the implantation site – listening with headphones didn’t trigger the cells, despite how cute tiny headphones would look on a mouse. Also, environmental sounds like airplanes, lawn mowers and car horns didn’t trigger the cells, which is good news, because accidentally receiving too much insulin is just as dangerous as not making enough.

The researchers also found that the insulin-producing units inside the cell could refill their levels of insulin within four hours when they were treated with another round of music. This means that these special cells are capable of providing multiple doses of insulin in a 24 hour period, and could potentially meet the needs of diabetics who are eating three meals a day. This rock n’ roll approach to administering insulin is very exciting but still very new.

So far this technique has only been demonstrated in mice, and there are a lot of safety concerns and questions to consider in order to scale up this therapy to humans. Aside from the danger of accidentally receiving too much insulin, there’s also a risk of the body rejecting these cells altogether. Besides, inquiring minds want to know.

What happens to your insulin levels if you work out to Don’t Stop Me Now? What if you just really like trying to hit the high notes in Somebody to Love? And of course the ultimate risk – what if you’re just really more of a Rolling Stones guy?

Concerns – and jokes – aside, this method could one day prove to be a great alternative therapy to insulin injections. Hopefully, as they work towards making this therapy a reality, researchers can come up with an alternative to just blasting music at the injection site, like isolating the low bass beats that make the ion channels open up. You know, something a little more precise and, like, medical.

Though if you want to argue Queen has actual healing powers, I’m not going to stop you. This video, and many others like it, were brought to you with the support of our patrons on Patreon. What we do just isn’t possible without you, so thanks.

And thanks to all of you for watching. [♪ OUTRO]