A brief history of insulin

By Frank E. Goldman, PharmD .

We live in an era of seemingly ceaseless technological advances - hybrid cars, the Internet, cell phones - many of which improve our quality of life.

If you have Type 1 diabetes, you no doubt are a big fan of one particular innovation: Insulin therapy. Before there was insulin therapy, people whose bodies stopped producing the hormone faced the prospect of a premature death; there wasn't much doctors could do for them.

Once researchers figured out in the 19 ^th century the body needs this critical hormone to burn glucose energy, doctors searched for different ways to restart production of insulin in people with Type 1 diabetes. Some physicians even tried feeding fresh pancreas to patients.

In 1922, a former divinity student - Dr. Frederick Banting - figured out how to extract insulin from a dog's pancreas. Encouraged by his early findings, Banting refined the formula and injected the insulin into the buttocks of a 14-year-old, whose body was ravaged by diabetes. The boy's condition improved rapidly. His blood sugar dropped from 520 mg/dl to a more manageable 120 mg/dl.

Banting and a colleague at the University of Toronto, Dr. John James Richard Macleod, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in recognition of this breakthrough discovery. Commercial production of insulin for treating diabetes began soon after. For many years, drug companies derived the hormone using pancreases that came primarily from stockyards, taken from slaughtered cows and pigs.

Animal insulin has saved millions of lives, but it has a potential complication in some diabetics: it can cause an allergic reaction. In 1978, an upstart biotech company named Genentech produced the first synthetically manufactured insulin that could be made in large amounts.

By the time it became widely available in the early 1980s, this new insulin changed the treatment of diabetes perpetually.

Among adults in the United States who have been diagnosed with diabetes:

• 16 percent take insulin only.
12 percent take both insulin and oral diabetes medications.
57 percent take oral diabetes medications only.
15 percent do not take insulin or oral diabetes medications