Humalog ® is a commercially available, by prescription, modified human insulin.
It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1996 and was specifically developed to be active quickly after injection by quickly lowering levels of blood glucose (thus it is called a rapid-acting insulin).
It is mostly used to treat type 1 diabetes in adults and usually given with long-acting insulin.
Humalog ® (also referred to as “insulin lispro injection”) is manufactured much like Humulin ® , as it is produced by recombinant DNA technology (using a strain of E. coli or Escherichia coli ).
When was the first synthesized human insulin available?
The first human insulin to be synthesized was called Humulin ® , manufactured by a technique known as recombinant DNA (or the inserting of human genetic instructions into a bacterium that then produces the drug).
It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1982 but was not marketed, and thus was not widely available, until 1983.
It is almost, but not exactly, identical to the insulin produced by the human pancreas, and for the most part, it acts in the same way as the body’s own natural insulin.
Humulin ® is also considered a rapid-acting insulin (it takes a relatively short time to become active in a person’s bloodstream after taking it, compared to some other types of insulin; for more about the various types of insulin, see the chapter “Taking Charge of Diabetes”).
Why was insulin considered “the cure” for so long, and why has thinking it was a “cure” been somewhat detrimental to diabetes research?
W hen insulin was finally discovered and commercially available, it seemed to most people, especially those who did not have diabetes, to be “the cure” for the disease.
But as many people now know, while insulin has helped many people for years, it is not the only solution to diabetes (type 1, type 2, and all other types) problems.
As one researcher mentioned after insulin was discovered, it appeared that diabetes research was almost forgotten.
But there are so many other aspects of the disease (such as the many complications, including kidney disease) and other treatments that should be investigated (such as islet transplantation or development of an artificial pancreas).
Thus, many researchers say that the “cure” should never have been about insulin alone.
STATISTICS AND DIABETES
What are the ten leading causes of death in the United States?
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the top leading causes of death in the United States were as follows as of 2014 (listed in a report in 2015), and included diabetes: