LY Med's video: Nobel Prizes Explained: The Insulin Race

Want to support the channel? Be a patron at: https://www.patreon.com/LYMED Subscribe for future videos in this series! Diabetes is one of the biggest health problems facing the world today. It is estimated that by 2040, about 1 in 5 Americans will have diabetes, half a million will die and cost to the us will reach over half a trillion dollars. This horrible horrible disease is caused by high blood sugar. That’s the problem. The lasting theories is that excess blood sugar affects the lining of blood vessels. This can cause permeability- or leaking, as well as thickening, which leads to decrease in oxygen and nutrient delivery. This can affect the blood vessels of your kidneys (kidney failure), eyes (blindness), nerves (neuropathy). This horrible disease that causes strokes, kidney failure and dialysis, vision loss and amputations. What causes diabetes and high blood sugar? Well the principle hormone that lowers sugar in our blood and puts in in our cells is insulin. Insulin is produced by an organ in your abdomen, the pancreas. Some people don’t have the insulin producing cells in their pancreas, or due to an autoimmune attack, they destroy their own, leading to a lack of insulin production. This is what we call type 1 diabetes. Lately, and globally, there has been a rise in type 2 diabetes. Generally type 2 diabetics make enough insulin, it just doesn’t work. Along with genetics type 2 DM is also linked to obesity, lack of physical activity and poor diet. Back then, type 1 DM was prevalent and having it was more or less a death sentence. Insulin wasn’t available, you couldn’t produce it, so blood sugar kept building up until you died. Now there are many drugs now that can help diabetic patients, but none more powerful than insulin. Who discovered insulin? How was it isolated? Enter Frederick Banting and John Macleod Banting was a Canadian physician born in 1891. A lover of art, he enrolled in the university of Toronto to study art. he didn’t quite make the cut and failed his first year. So he changed to doctoring. Along with his practice, he would give medical lectures to the students in the University of Toronto. One day he had to give a lecture on the pancreas, and therefore he was reading scientific reports about said subject when he stumbled upon one that suggests diabetes was due to a lack of hormone from the pancreas. This hormone was named “insulin” – which was thought to help control blood sugar, and if replaced could potentially cure diabetes. Earlier attempts to isolate this magical hormone prove difficult. First attempts came from grinding up pancreas cells and trying to extract insulin. Others include feeding patients pancreas extracts. That didn’t work – likely due to the release of other pancreatic enzymes that probably destroyed the insulin. However In 1920, Russian physician Moses Barron described a rare pancreatic stone that obstructed the pancreatic duct.This caused the cells that produced insulin stayed intact, but the cells that produced other enzymes that might break down insulin deteriorated. He later described how if you tie the pancreatic duct closed, it would produce the same results. Banting realized that this might be his key to isolating insulin. He approached another professor at his school, John Macleod, about this idea. Macleod wasn’t so sure, as many scientist before him and tried and failed to isolate insulin Eventually, Banting convinced MacLeoud to set him up with his facilities and students and started doing these experiments for the summer. But eventually…Success! With insulin isolated, he opened a clinic and began to treat diabetic patients, becoming the first. Insulin would later be commercially made using bacteria, but this first proof of concept opened the door on how we treat diabetes. He would sell his patent for a dollar, feeling it unethical for doctors to profit and wanting insulin to be available to all. Banting would unfortunately die at an early age due to a plane crash, but for his and John MacLeods seminal work, they would both be awarded the Nobel prize in 1923. Disclaimer: These videos do not provide medical advice and are for informational purposes only. The videos are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read or seen in any LY Med video.