11 Gennaio 1922, l'Insulina salverà milioni di vite.

In 1916 Professor Nicolae Paulescu, professor at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Bucharest, Romania, extracted a liquid from the pancreas which he subsequently injected into a dog with diabetes. Paulescu observed that the blood sugar levels normalized and he published the results and patented his discovery in 1922, pancrein.

In Canada Frederick Grant Banting focused his studies on the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas and on pancreatic secretion. Banting asked for help from the Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto John James Richard Macleod, together with medical student Charles Best and biochemist James Bertrand Collip, and they managed to obtain on 17/05/1922 an extract from the pancreas purified from salts and fats, a drug (insulin) that would change the lives of millions of people. In 1923 Banting and Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

There was controversy over the fact that the Nobel Prize was not given to Prof. Paulescu, considered by many to be the father of the discovery.

Today, thanks to research, optimal management of diabetes has been achieved, in the United States, the role of the nurse is authorized to educate diabetic patients. Even in our country, the path taken is the right one, even if still slow. Let us remember that diabetes in 2015 caused 5 million deaths, one every 6 seconds.
We are not talking about the permanent damage it causes to millions of other people, from limb amputation to blindness to kidney, heart problems, etc. etc. 

Today insulin is not just one, there are variants available depending on speed and duration of action: we have ultra-fast (lispro, aspart, glulisine), fast (regular human), intermediate (NPH), long-acting (degludec, detemir, lisproprotamine, glargine). There are pre-mixed combinations of ultra-fast and intermediate insulin. Or prolonged duration (lantus, levemir).

Some research promises that one day diabetes will be completely eradicated, but without those great men who dedicated their lives to research, we would never have reached the point of one day being able to defeat diabetes.

Laura Rita Santoro
Parisi Vincenzo