On Banting, Best and Macleod first got together to begin their research and set about figuring out how to remove insulin from a dog’s pancreas. This would be the way they would know whether their insulin extracts were having any benefit. Best specialised in testing blood to check glucose levels. Macleod provided Banting with the labs needed to conduct their experiments and brought in a research student, called Charles Best, to help out. They put their minds together and began to work on a plan. On 7 November 1920 he paid a visit to a top professor at the University of Toronto, John Macleod. Banting realised that this might allow for the removal of insulin by breaking down the pancreas in a way that would leave just the cells that produce insulin intact.īut Banting wasn’t a scientist and knew he couldn’t test his theory alone. In October 1920, Frederick Banting – a Canadian surgeon – read an article that suggested insulin-producing cells in the pancreas are slower to deteriorate than other pancreas tissue. The challenge was to find a way to extract insulin from the pancreas without it being destroyed in the process. Attempts had been made to extract insulin from ground-up pancreas cells, but they’d all proved unsuccessful. Understanding the cause of type 1 diabetes meant researchers now had a chance of treating the condition. 7 November 1920 – great minds come togetherīy 1920 scientists had already pinpointed clusters of cells in the pancreas, called islets, that produce insulin and worked out that it’s these cells that are destroyed in type 1 diabetes. Here we take a look at the journey that got us there. It was one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in history, which went on to save millions of lives around the world and triggered a century of diabetes discoveries. Insulin was discovered by Sir Frederick G Banting (pictured), Charles H Best and JJR Macleod at the University of Toronto in 1921 and it was later purified by James B Collip.
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