Can dairy cows help diabetics as an insulin source?

Millions of people living with type 1 diabetes around the world don’t have reliable access to insulin. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, have found a radical new way to produce the stuff: a gene-edited cow that produces human insulin in its milk.

Researchers inserted a segment of human DNA coding for the precursor of active insulin called proinsulin into the cell nuclei of ten cow embryos. Out of the ten embryos, one gene-edited calf was born in Brazil. Once matured, the cow was impregnated and stimulated to lactate using hormones. To their surprise, the cow not only produced proinsulin, but even insulin in her milk, Neoscope reported.

Using a cow’s mammary gland as a protein factory, University of Illinois animal sciences professor Matt Wheeler, said researchers can take advantage of that system to produce a protein that can help hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

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