Insulin Therapy - History

History

• 1922 Banting, Best, Collip use bovine insulin extract in humans
• 1922 Leonard Thompson and then Elizabeth Hughes Gossett are treated
• 1923 Eli Lilly produces commercial quantities of much purer bovine insulin than Banting et al. had used
• 1923 Farbwerke Hoechst, one of the forerunner's of today's Sanofi Aventis, produces commercial quantities of bovine insulin in Germany
• 1923 Hagedorn founds the Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium in Denmark – forerunner of today's Novo Nordisk
• 1926 Nordisk receives a Danish charter to produce insulin as a non-profit
• 1936 Canadians D.M. Scott, A.M. Fisher formulate a zinc insulin mixture and license it to Novo
• 1936 Hagedorn discovers that adding protamine to insulin prolongs the duration of action of insulin
• 1946 Nordisk formulates Isophane porcine insulin aka Neutral Protamine Hagedorn or NPH insulin
• 1946 Nordisk crystallizes a protamine and insulin mixture
• 1950 Nordisk markets NPH insulin
• 1953 Novo formulates Lente porcine and bovine insulins by adding zinc for longer lasting insulin
• 1955 Frederick Sanger determines the amino acid sequence of insulin
• 1966 Synthesized by total synthesis by C.L. Tsou, Wang Yinglai, and coworkers
• 1969 Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin solves the crystal structure of insulin by x-ray crystallography
• 1973 Purified monocomponent (MC) insulin is introduced
• 1973 The U.S. officially "standardized" insulin sold for human use in the U.S. to U-100 (100 units per milliliter). Prior to that, insulin was sold in different strengths, including U-80 (80 units per milliliter) and U-40 formulations (40 units per milliliter), so the effort to "standardize" the potency aimed to reduce dosage errors and ease doctors' job of prescribing insulin for patients. Other countries also followed suit.
• 1978 Genentech produces biosynthetic 'human' insulin in Escheria coli bacteria using recombinant DNA techniques, licenses to Eli Lilly
• 1981 Novo Nordisk chemically and enzymatically converts porcine to 'human' insulin
• 1982 Genentech synthetic 'human' insulin (above) approved
• 1983 Eli Lilly and Company produces biosynthetic 'human' insulin with recombinant DNA technology, Humulin
• 1985 Axel Ullrich sequences a human cell membrane insulin receptor.
• 1988 Novo Nordisk produces recombinant biosynthetic 'human' insulin
• 1996 Lilly Humalog "lispro" insulin analogue approved.
• 2000 Sanofi Aventis Lantus insulin "glargine" analogue approved for clinical use in the US and Europe.
• 2004 Sanofi Aventis Apidra insulin "glulisine" insulin analogue approved for clinical use in the US.
• 2006 Novo Nordisk Levemir "detemir" insulin analogue approved for clinical use in the US.