Diabetes happens when the body doesn’t have enough insulin, also called Type 1 diabetes, where the body’s own immune system damages cells in our body’s insulin-making machine called the pancreas.
Diabetes can also happen when the body gets insulin but doesn’t know how to use this insulin properly. This is called Type 2 diabetes, where the body becomes resistant to insulin, and the pancreas can’t make enough to keep up.
Both lead to high blood sugar levels
Although scientists have found ways to make insulin using different methods, such as E coli and yeast, researchers at the University of Illinois aim to make insulin in cow’s milk.
This is because they produce much milk, and milk is an everyday product in most homes.
The researchers explain in their paper that they used special techniques to put human insulin genes into cow cells so that the cows produce milk containing human insulin. This milk can, in turn, make insulin for people.
“Mother Nature designed the mammary gland as a factory to make protein really, really efficiently. We can take advantage of that system to produce a protein that can help hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” said Matt Wheeler, professor of biotechnology and developmental biology at the University of Illinois and co-author of the study.
Wheeler and his team used somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), which was previously used to create transgenic animals, like sheep, cows, and pigs, that can produce specific proteins, like insulin.
Hellbound and Down 