Investigating the effects of Ceylon cinnamon water extract on HepG2 cells for type 2 diabetes therapy Corresponding author: Lidan You. Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Institute of Biomedical Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cinnamon and its extracts have been used herbal remedies including reducing insulin resistance and diabetic complications. T2DM is a rapidly growing health concern around the world[[1]](#ref-0001). While many drugs are now available for T2DM treatment, side effects and costs can be considerable, and there is increasing interest in natural products for managing chronic health conditions[2]. Cinnamon may decrease the expression of genes associated with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) risk. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of cinnamon water extract (CWE) and metformin on T2DM-related gene expression. The HepG2 human hepatoma cell line is widely used in drug metabolism and hepatotoxicity studies. HepG2 cells were treated with different concentrations of metformin or CWE for 24 or 48 h. Cell viability was assessed by MTT assay, and glucose uptake was compared between untreated and CWE- or metformin-treated cells under high-glucose conditions. Finally, total RNA was extracted and analyzed by RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq), and bioinformatics analysis was performed to compare the transcriptional effects of CWE and metformin. We found that cell viability was higher in cells treated with CWE than in metformin-treated cells, demonstrating that the cinnamon extract was not toxic at the tested doses. CWE significantly increased glucose uptake in HepG2 cells to the same degree as metformin (1.4-fold). RNA-Seq data revealed that CWE and metformin both induced significant changes (1.3- to 1.4-fold increases) in glucose uptake gene expression compared with untreated controls, but that transcriptional differences between CWE and metformin conditions were not significant. The effects of 0.125 mg mL CWE on gene expression were comparable to those seen with 1.5 mg mL (9.5 mM) metformin. We found that gene expression at 0.125 mg mL-1 CWE was comparable to 1.5 mg mL-1 (9.5 mM) metformin. Our results reveal that CWE’s effects on cell viability, glucose uptake, and gene expression in HepG2 cells are comparable to those of the widely used antidiabetic drug metformin, suggesting that CWE may be an effective dietary supplement for mitigating T2DM-related metabolic dysfunction.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".