La découverte de l’insuline 1921–1922 : un saut dans la recherche biomédicale.

Abstract

Discovery of insulin. If the symptoms of diabetes have been known since Antiquity, it is at the end of the 19th century that several investigators searched for the active substance of the pancreas and endeavoured to produce extracts that lowered blood and urine glucose and decreased polyuria in pancreatectomized dogs. The breakthrough came 100 years ago when the team of Frederick Banting, Charles Best and James Collip, working in the Department of Physiology, headed by John MacLeod at the University of Toronto, managed to obtain pancreatic extracts that could be used to treat patients and rescue them from the edge of death by starvation, the only treatment then available. This achievement was quickly recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Banting and MacLeod in 1923. The discovery has had important scientific, industrial and clinical developments still efficient nowadays.