Where Do They Get Human Insulin For Diabetics?
Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at
7:43 pm
I take Novolin and it says “human insulin”. Where do they get that from? Is it synthetic or do they actually take real peoples insulin when they die?
Tagged with: Diabetics • Human • Insulin • They • Where
Filed under: Diabetes Questions and Answers
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Novolin is a synthetic insulin which is structurally identical to the insulin produced by your pancreas. This is a man made product.
My brother is also a type one diabetic and if I remeber correctly this one is actually synthetic but identical to the insulin your pancreas produces. They get some insulin from pigs I heard. I don’t know if that is true. That’s weird huh?
Oh yea I just looked it up – it can come from cows, pigs or fish and is close enough in genetic make up that it is/can be used for humans but because of some impurities can cause an allergic reaction in some. That is why the most often used insulin is genetically engineered insulin like yours or Humalin. That is what I read on Wikipedia anyways! =)
no they grow it. insulin is an enzyme, which means it’s strands of amino acids linked together by peptide bonds. they can combine the amino acids in all the right ways to create synthetic insulin that is identical to human insulin.
works real good!
you answered your own question its synthetic but your body cant tell the difference
Made in a lab
It’s synthetic.
Novolin is made by Novo/Nordisk, a company doing business in the diabetes arena for over 80 years. The product is similar to Lilly’s Humulin. Both are recombinant human insulin, a peptide (short protein) consisting of 2 separate amino acid chains that are linked together.
The recombinant means they are produced by adding the gene for human insulin to bacteria. As the bacteria grow, they produce large amounts of insulin. The bacteria are then killed and the insulin extracted and purified so no bacterial components remain. The end result is pure human insulin in the proper form.
This type of insulin can’t be man-made at this point because it would require technology beyond simply putting out amino acids in the proper sequence. We don’t yet have artificial means of making the peptides fold and link in the proper manner, so we use a bacteria’s internal machinery to do it for us. This has the extra advantage of being able to produce huge amounts of the correct thing for relatively small amounts of money.