How is insulin made?
In: Chemistry
It is synthesised by engineered bacteria which are grown in vats. The bacteria express the insulin into the media contained in the vat. This is then harvested, purified, tested, packaged and sold
It’s very complicated, but the basic process is to genetically engineer a bacteria to contain a specific part of the human genome that codes for the production of insulin. Then you grow a big batch of the bacteria and feed them so they produce insulin. Then you chop them up and separate out all the stuff that’s not insulin.
Each of those steps is very complicated and protected by many patented processes and machines. That’s how there can be so many different providers and different cost profiles.
We take bacteria and insert the genes that make human insulin into their genetic code. We then let them make the insulin, kill the bacteria, and filter out the insulin.
Before we could do this, we harvested insulin from animals (like pigs) but animal insulin isn’t as good on humans as human insulin
This is also how we make other hormones too, like heparin, testosterone, estrogen, etc
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