Some of that happened in Canada when it was showed that Capscacin was shown to reduce swelling in islet cells in the pancreas, curing diabetes type one in rats.
That news, and both researchers, left the face of the earth somehow.
The worst thing that could happen to the health care economy is a cure for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Cash cow.
Until recently, those islet cells were thought to be dead. It’s not turning out to be the case.
The problem in the case of diabetes research is that rodent results are notoriously unreliable predictors of how humans will respond to the same treatment. They've "cured" diabetes in mice several different ways, bot those treatments have not been successful on humans.
Moreover, just the fact that you haven't seen it in the news doesn't mean researchers aren't looking at it. I would suspect that one of the biggest initial barriers to even contemplating a capscacin treatment is how to deliver it to the pancreas in the first place: that's a huge engineering problem in and of itself. And then, once the engineering is done, there's the expense and difficulty of human testing. It takes years to go from mice to humans....