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Insulin from animals have not been used for human injections in like 4 decades. We use synthetic insulin-like proteins these days. And they are produced typical
by guywhocodes 5y ago
Insulin from animals have not been used for human injections in like 4 decades. We use synthetic insulin-like proteins these days. And they are produced typically by modified e-coli.
This product does not produce insulin, like other insulin pumps it contains a reservoir of it.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoLol I had heard it was made by bacteria but not that that was e. coli :) It's weird to know that something we inject to save lives comes from poop :P And a bacteria that can actually cause severe illness itself! I wonder why they picked that specific bacteria? Maybe because it's one of the first known to man and as a result we know so much about it?
- guywhocodes 5y agoI don't think the process was developed specifically for insulin production but rather arbitrary protein synthesis. And we just applied existing technology to insulin production. Anyway this was like mid 70s so there probably were no options. Edit: I don't know anything about the benefits or issues with using e-coli specifically.
- mattkrause 5y agoE. coli is a very common model organism for molecular biology and a really popular tool for generating synthetic proteins. (Yeast too). Bacteria have a neat feature where, in addition to their "main" chromosomal DNA, they also have small circular "loops" of DNA called plasmids that can be copied independently. In 1973, Cohen and Boyer demonstrated that one could "cut" a piece of DNA from one source, insert it into an E. coli plasmid, and then coax the cells into producing the protein coded for by the edited gene. This trick lets you generate "heterologous proteins" by purifying them from the cells or can change how the cell behaves. E coli. can't make every kind of proteins, but they can make a lot of them. It's also cheap and easy to grow, so it's often the "default" approach.