Though produced in lettuce, the insulin would be delivered to human patients as a powder in capsules because the dosage must be controlled carefully.
If human trials are successful, the impact of Daniells research could affect millions of diabetics worldwide and dramatically reduce the costs of fighting a disease that can lead to heart and kidney diseases and blindness.
About 20.8 million children and adults in the United States, or about 7 percent of the population, have Type 1 or 2 diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association.
The number of Americans with diabetes is projected to double by 2025, according to a study released last month by the National Changing Diabetes Program during a congressional briefing. That study by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. also reported that one of every eight federal health care dollars $79.7 billion out of $645 billion -- is spent on treating people with diabetes.
Diabetes is a big health and financial burden in the United States and in the rest of the world, Daniell said. This study would facilitate a dramatic change because so far there is no medicine that will cure insulin-dependent diabetes.
Daniells method of growing insulin in plants is similar to what he used for an earlier study to produce anthrax vaccine in tobacco. In the earlier study, which also involved mice, Daniell showed and the National Institutes of Health confirmed that enough safe anthrax vaccine to inoculate everyone in the United States could be grown inexpensively in only one acre of tobacco plants
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Contact: Chad Binette
cbinette@mail.ucf.edu
407-823-6312
University of Central Florida
30-Jul-2007