By LEONARD BERTIN
Star Science Editor
[Head shot of Bertin]
A new form of insulin has been invented by researchers in the University of Toronto's Connaught Laboratories.
Known as "sulphated insulin," it may help hundreds -and possibly thousands-of diabetics throughout the world who are resistant to ordinary forms of the drug.
The resistant condition is 80 rare that only 12 cases are known to exist in all Canada, despite the fact that an average of two in every hundred of the general population suffer from the common form of the disease.
Those strongly resistant to insulin may need 50 to 100 times the normal dose to control the disease. Many die slowly and painfully. because their disease was not understood.
Two Main Groups
Diabetics fall into two main groups: Those who apparently inherit the disease and begin to show' signs of it in childhood; and those who first show symptoms in middle age, apparently be- cause of the way they live and eat but also, possibly because of an inherited weakness.
In either case, the symptoms are the same. Their bodies cease to produce insulin or do not produce enough of it. They cannot, as a result, "burn" blood sugar and convert it into energy.
Their muscles starve and gradually wither. Abnormal quantities of sugar begin to accumulate in their blood and urine.
Some of this is excreted. Some, instead, is converted into acid in the blood and favors infections and a general degeneration of tissue.
Sight Suffers
Blood vessels begin to break down, the sight suffers and feet may become gangrenous to the point where it is necessary to amputate limbs, a little at a time, to prevent spread of infection.
This unhappy picture, known since ancient times, changed suddenly for the better in 1921, when two University of Toronto scientists, Charles H. Best and the late Sir Frederick Banting, showed that insulin could be extracted from the pancreatic glands (the "short- breads") of cattle and pigs and that this insulin had the power to abolish symptoms of the disease in humans.
Since then, many different forms of insulin have been produced from animal extracts. But their non-human origin has always, it now seems, resulted in a small percentage of allergies and! resistance.
The discovery of this fact provided a challenge that was accepted by the Connaught Laboratories in 1959.
Different Kind
A team led by Dr. Peter Moloney first overcame the problem by extracting a or slightly different form of insulin from fishes. Fearing, that, sooner later, some humans would develop resistance also to this form, because of its "foreign" origin, they set out to produce a different form by purely chemical alteration. They were very soon successful.
"It may take several years of painstaking work to confirm that this latest form will serve our purpose," said Dr. Strathearn Wilson, one of the team. "There are so few people with the resistant form of the disease that it is difficult to carry out properly controlled trials."
As always happens, however, when a new and successful treatment is discovered, people needing treatment appear from nowhere.
"It seems that insulin resistance in diabetics is not nearly so rare a disability as we once thought," Dr. J. K. W. Ferguson, director of the laboratories, says. "The problem at this time is to make enough of the new drug to meet the demands for it."
For some time, possibly several years, and until the workings of the drug are fully understood, it will only issued to a limited number; of patients who can be kept under observation at all times.
35 DIE ON WEEKEND
PARIS (Reuters)-French police used 6,000 cars and 23 helicopters to control week-end traffic in which accidents claimed 35 lives.