An experimental drug prevented mice from developing diabetes and heart disease and might one day be used to stave off the diseases in humans, US researchers said on Wednesday.

The drug, which was developed by researchers at Harvard University in collaboration with Bristol-Meyers Squibb, blocked a protein needed to move fats around the body and made the mice resistant to the diseases.

The drug also reversed symptoms of diabetes and heart disease in mice that had them. "It shoots two big birds with a single bullet," said Gokhan Hotamisligil, chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health's Department of Genetics and Complex Diseases.

Mice given the drug became immune to diabetes, heart disease and other metabolic disorders even though they were severely obese or had high cholesterol and extremely high-fat diets.

Hotamisligil's work, published in the journal Nature, builds on his lab's prior discovery of a gene that is linked with diabetes and obesity in mice. They found that mice who lacked the gene resisted those diseases. "No matter what we did, we couldn't get them to develop diabetes," he said in an interview.