Question

Eli Lilly, an American company, is famous for

• A. Producing vitamin ‘A’ enriched rice
• B. Producing pest resistant plants by RNA interference
• C. Producing transgenic soybean for herbicide resistance
• D. Preparing two DNA sequences corresponding to A and B chains of human insulin and introduced them in the plasmids of E.coli to produce insulin

Answer 1

Answer: (D)

Eli Lilly marketed the first such insulin, Humulin, in 1982. Humulin was the first medication produced using modern genetic engineering techniques in which actual human DNA is inserted into a host cell (E. coli in this case). The host cells are then allowed to grow and reproduce normally, and due to the inserted human DNA, they produce a synthetic version of human insulin. However, the clinical preparations prepared from such insulins differ from endogenous human insulin in several important respects; an example is the absence of C-peptide which has in recent years been shown to have systemic effects itself. Genentech developed the technique Lilly used to produce Humulin, although the company never commercially marketed the product themselves.