Professor Henry Daniell, who previously showed that anthrax vaccine can be grown in tobacco plants, has now produced insulin in tobacco plants. He made capsules of these powdered leaves, gave the powdered cells to five week old mice for eight weeks and essentially cured the mice of diabetes.
He plans to bioengineer lettuce to contain insulin and then dry and powder the leaves, put them in capsules and feed them to humans. This packaging should delay digestion or denaturation of the contents until the contents are broken down and released by bacteria in the intestines. This insulin should be picked up by the blood stream.
It needs to be said that this would probably need to be administered to infants or very young children who would be inoculated by the insulin. This should change their immune systems so that there would be no attack on their own insulin producing cells, thus preventing Diabetes I.
Professor Daniell is the University of Central Florida, Trustee Chair in Life Sciences.
A more detailed summary of this information can be found at http://www.eurekalert.org/pubnews.php - Insulin grown in plants relieves diabetes in mice; UCF study holds promise for humans
The original article is printed in the July issue of Plant Biotechnology Journal.
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