The Development of Single Polypeptide Chain Insulin

Insulin is a hormone patients with diabetes use to control their blood sugar. According to the CDC’s 2020 Diabetes Report, a tenth of Americans have diabetes and a third of American adults are prediabetic. Millions of diabetes patients are unable to keep up with the rising costs and daily mental stress of insulin treatment. To combat these obstacles, Dr. Ke-He Ruan, director of the Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Pharmacoinformatics at the University of Houston, proposed developing a single polypeptide chain (SPC) insulin – as opposed to its current structure of two chains. When running experiments on mice to test insulin’s period of effectivity, researchers concluded that the SPC-insulin lasted around four times longer than the regular wildtype insulin. Therefore, patients would require less dosages, resulting in lower costs over time. Furthermore, the SPC-insulin would make production a “one-step� process versus the multi-step process of the wildtype. The improved process would inevitably increase the efficacy of insulin production and reduce the cost of development. Also, the SPC-insulin provides a new generation of insulin that could be transformed into long-acting insulin analogs. The goal is to establish the SPC_p plasmid with a GST tag and insert it into E-coli genome. Then, cell harvest procedures and purification of the recombination protein would be performed. The data will result in the analysis of SDS-PAGE and western blots. Overall, this project can revolutionize insulin treatment that could lead to cheaper costs, better quality and production, and longer life spans.