Leonard Thompson the first person to be successfully treated with insulin
Exactly 90 years ago today a 14-year-old Canadian boy, Leonard Thompson, became the first person with diabetes to be successfully treated with insulin.
Since then it's gone on to save the lives of countless people.
Without this medical breaktrhough, a million people in the UK who are kept alive with daily insulin injections would not be here.
Prior to insulin treatment a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes was an invariable death sentence, with patients usually surviving for only a few months, and often just weeks or days.
Since the historic treatment – arguably one of the greatest medical advances of the twentieth century – millions of people worldwide have used insulin, usually in the form of injections, to regulate their blood glucose levels and stay alive.
In 1922 Dr. Frederick Banting discovered insulin and its positive effect on the body, originally using dogs in medical trials. Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes two years previously, was the first person for whom insulin came to be a life-saving drug.
Although his first experience of insulin was not successful, once the hormone extract had been improved, Leonard received a suitable dose in an injection on 23 January 1922. Thanks to insulin injections he went from a 65 pound boy close to death through malnourishment – the only treatment at this time for diabetes was a starvation diet – to live into adulthood.
Following the successful delivery of purified insulin, for the first time in history there was clear, unambiguous evidence that scientists were able to replace the natural insulin that is not produced in people with Type 1 diabetes. The condition develops if the body is unable to produce any insulin and is therefore life threatening without the treatment first used by Banting. Type 1 diabetes accounts for around 10 per cent of all cases.
A step towards self-management
Not long after Leonard Thompson’s treatment began, in 1934 novelist HG Wells and his practitioner Dr RD Lawrence, both of whom had diabetes, set up the Diabetic Association aiming to make sure that everyone in the UK could gain access to insulin. The charity called for a national health service and stressed the importance of self-management of diabetes, given that the condition was life-long. This charity later became Diabetes UK.
Today Diabetes UK is the leading charity for over 3.7 million people in the UK with diabetes – 2.9 million diagnosed and an estimated 850,000 who have diabetes but do not know it - their families, friends and healthcare professionals.
The future of diabetes
Looking forward, research like that undertaken by Professor Ken Siddle of the University of Cambridge on exploring the mechanisms by which variation in the human genetic code influences the action of insulin, hopes to shed more light on insulin and how it can be used to treat diabetes. Overall Professor Siddle is optimistic about the future. Within the next 10-20 years he thinks that there will be both better definitions of the various causes of diabetes and a wider range of drugs available for targeting those causes.