Growing Insulin

McLuhanesque writes "The Globe and Mail reports that a Calgary biotech firm has developed a process to turn genetically modified safflower oil into human insulin in commercial quantities. The process reduces capital costs by 70% and product cost by 40%. 'SemBioSys says it can make more than one kilogram of human insulin per acre of safflower production. That amount could treat 2,500 diabetic patients for one year and, in turn, meet the world's total projected insulin demand in 2010 with less than 16,000 acres of safflower production.'"

Comments

Re:could someone do back-of-envelope calculation

[Andy Dodd]

For the case of Type I insulin-dependent diabetics which are the primary group this technology advance would benefit: None

There are two main types of diabetes (with a couple of oddball variants that are rare, diabetes mellitus describes the final symptom of elevated bloodsugar, there are a few possible root causes of that symptom, which determine the type). Type I is known as insulin-dependent or juvenile diabetes (because it is rarely diagnosed past the age of 20). It is caused by the immune system attacking the beta cells of the pancreas. Eventually all beta cells die and the body can no longer produce any insulin, so it must be provided from an external source. Type I is generally considered to be the "severe" form of diabetes because of this fact. Prior to the discovery of insulin, average life expectancy after diagnosis was 1-2 years, and the disease killed younger children faster than teenagers. Oh, it was a rather slow, painful, and unpleasant death too. Essentially no matter how much you ate and drank, your body would slowly dehydrate and starve.

Type II is usually referred to simply as adult-onset diabetes, because until recently, it has been unheard of for young people to develop it. (A high prevalence of childhood obesity is changing this). In Type II diabetes, the body does produce insulin, but for various reasons it is not enough, whether it is due to reduced capacity or increased demands beyond normal capacity, or a combination of both. Most of the time, once diagnosed, Type II diabetes can be managed solely with oral medication which increases the body's sensitivity to the insulin it does produce, and in many cases controlled solely with diet and exercise. (Losing weight can often cause Type II diabetes to disappear.) It is extremely rare for Type II to require external insulin rejections. Interestingly enough, while Type II is less "severe", this very fact makes it far more dangerous because it frequently goes undiagnosed for long periods of time, and the elevated bloodsugars do damage to various parts of the body.

This is definately an interesting development, but how will this company deal with patented "designer" insulins such as Lantus (from Aventis Pharmaceutical, a special "peakless" insulin used to provide a long-acting baseline insulin dose), and Novolog/Humalog, two "extremely rapid acting" insulins that actually take effect FASTER than injecting normal human insulin. FYI, "human insulin" is insulin produced by genetically engineered bacteria that is identical to human insulin, it is NOT extracted from humans, unlike pork and beef insulins which were extracted from the pancreases of pigs and cows respectively. While I'm sure their technology will work with Lantus and Humalog/Novolog, I don't know how the companies that produce the above three will react to this. Most likely they'll license the technology from this new company (if it works) or vice versa... I hope so.