Insulin is the only hormone within the human body which reduces the level of sugar in the blood. It is secreted in response to a rise in blood sugar, for example, after having eaten a meal, or in conditions of stress. While under the influence of insulin, the sugar is converted into glycogen in the cells of both the liver and the muscle. If there is a lack in the production of insulin, or in some cases a complete absence, diabetes mellitus will occur. This disorder causes the blood sugar levels to increase too much, resulting in the overflow of sugar being present in the urine, loss of energy and weight and if the patient is not treated in time, death.
In 1921 at the University of Toronto, Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best researched and prepared the first Insulin hormone, which they had extracted from animal pancreas glands and tested on diabetic dogs. They found that when the dogs were treated with insulin all traces of the disease disappeared. They went on to test the hormone on human beings with diabetes and found the technique extremely successful.
Diabetes is an incurable disease and patients have to inject insulin into their skin every day to ensure they can live a normal life. Insulin can also be administered via a small pump which slowly inserts a constant supply into the body, partially imitating the function of the pancreas.
Thanks to a recently developed operation, in a few years time insulin injections could become a thing of the past. Langerhans are cells in the pancreas which normally produce insulin, in diabetics the body produces an antibody to these insulin cells which destroys them. Doctors have developed a technique which isolates these cells from donated pancreas and then they transplant them into the liver of the diabetic patient. Once in the liver the cells develop their own blood supply and function as well as they normally do in the pancreas, allaying the need for insulin injections.
