Chemically Modified Insulin Could Be A Breakthrough In Medical History

For those who are suffering diabetes, need to have insulin dose daily. Insulin is a Hormone produced by Pancreas which allows the human body to use Carbohydrate from the food. It burns glucose for the energy & stores for future use. In the human body, insulin is stored as a hexagonal polymer of Zinc-bound complex. Although the human body can only use the monomer form of insulin, so when the body requires, the Hexamer divides into six monomers to regulate blood sugar.

Now researchers are developing artificial insulin preparations to control the disassembly process. It will optimize the clinical treatment of diabetes mellitus. This modification process will increase the availability of insulin and it will also replace the individual atoms in a controlled process. According to the report by Science Daily, Such kind of result is known as insulin analog, quite different from the natural insulin.

A research team from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Basel has started this investigation with the collaboration of USA and Australia. Professor Markus Meuwly was the main director of this research, his team exchanged a single hydrogen atom by an Iodine atom to boost up the disassembly process with the help of rapid intermolecular interactions. This report was first published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

This is the first time in medical history Iodine(I) atoms were introduced to improve the availability of insulin. Although the biological functions are still same for the modified Insulin compared to the natural Insulin hormone. At the first step of the study, quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics simulations helped scientists to determine the advantages of this techniques. The final stage of the experiment was computed by the crystallographic and nuclear magnetic resonance experiments to change the stability of the chemically modified Insulin.

Using of halogen atoms will be an advantageous approach in medical science. In the field of protein Engineering, the chemical modification of insulin is one of the biggest breakthroughs because insulin analog differs from natural insulin by only a single atom. It will be a perfect alternative for the diabetic patients to keep balance their sugar level.