Biotech Firm Announces Plan to Develop Plant-Derived Insulin
by Mary Rettig
August 9, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Canadian company says it has found a new way to develop a safe, pure, and inexpensive form of insulin for diabetics -- from a plant. SemBioSys Genetics Incorporated of Calgary, Alberta, has announced that it can use safflower plants to create commercial levels of human insulin, which can be used in treating type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus and other insulin-related illnesses. President and CEO Andrew Baum says finding new ways to develop insulin is extremely important in today's health climate.
"One cannot read the papers without seeing articles about obesity, metabolic syndrome, and increasing incidence of diabetes," Baum points out. "Based on this," he says, "the demand for insulin is projected to increase somewhere between two and four times over the next four years."
This increase, the SemBioSys official explains, is being driven by a number of factors. Among these, he notes, are earlier diagnosis of diabetes and increasing incidence of the disease due to demographic trends and consumption and behavioral habits of the Western world -- habits increasingly prevalent in the developing world as well.
Baum says the amount of insulin needed worldwide is likely to quadruple by 2010, and safflower-derived insulin will be a viable and cheaper alternative for diabetics and others who need the medication. He says research has yielded safflower plants that will produce a kilogram of insulin per acre, or enough of the drug for 2,500 diabetics for an entire year.
"To put that in context," the biotech company executive explains, "we could produce the entire 2005 estimated worldwide supply of between 4 and 5 kilograms of insulin from less than 5,000 acres of safflower, which represents the production of less than half a dozen farms. This is very contained agriculture."
SemBioSys plans to continue its pre-clinical program with safflower-derived insulin and expects to be in a position to file an Investigational New Drug application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by the second half of the year 2007.
Mary Rettig, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
