Principal Investigators: Bernat Soria and José Luis Micol.
Investigators: Franz Martín Bermudo and María Rosa Ponce.
Instituto de Bioingeniería, Universidad Miguel Hernández.

Production in transgenic plants and testing of pharmaceutical proteins

Type 1 diabetes is a disease causing in our country an expenditure of 450,000 pesetas per patient per year; this is mainly due to the high price of insulin, which is produced industrially by fermentation of genetically engineered microorganisms. We propose in this project the use of a generally accepted plant model system, Arabidopsis thaliana, to obtain transgenic lines able to produce and accumulate human insulin in seeds or leaves. The effectiveness of the insulin drug thus obtained will be tested in experimental animals to which diabetes would had previously been induced. This project is proposed as a preliminary step to choosing a crop of agricultural interest for insulin farming.