Open in full screen mode It was in 1921 that Frederick G Banting and John James Rickard MacLeod discovered insulin, which remains an essential element in the fight against diabetes. Radio-Canada Please note that this article published in 2019 may contain information that is no longer current. Feature being tested Log inCreate my account Speech synthesis, based on artificial intelligence, makes it possible to generate spoken text from 'a written text. In 1923, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to two University of Toronto scientists, Frederick G. Banting and John James Rickard MacLeod, for their role in the discovery of insulin to combat diabetes. Reports presented on Radio-Canada show the important role played by several Canadians since 1923 in the fight against this disease. The Canadian medical community has long been at the forefront of the fight against diabetes. 
On November 29, 1998, host Charles Tisseyre of the show Découverteand director Emmanuelle Sauriol remind us of the exploit of Canadian doctor and pharmacologist Frederick G. Banting.
In 1921, he succeeded in overturning the fatal verdict of type 1 diabetes.
The genius of Dr. Banting and his assistant, Charles Herbert Best, was to have figured out how to provide people suffering from type 1 diabetes with the hormone called insulin, the absence of which in the human body causes the disease.
Banting and Best's research on insulin was partly inspired by the work of chemist John James Rickard MacLeod on the action of insulin on carbohydrate metabolism and its extraction.
Frederick G. Banting and John James Rickard MacLeod were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1923.
Charles Herbert Best, however, is excluded from this nomination. This sparks controversy.
Interview with journalist Caroline Carel with Doctor Jean-Louis Chiasson who explains what diabetes is.
In 1982, journalist Caroline Carel interviewed the endocrinologist Jean-Louis Chiasson, who is the director of the diabetes research laboratory at the University of Montreal.
In this interview, presented on the show Au jour le jouron October 26, 1982, Doctor Chiasson explains the different forms, causes and symptoms that accompany this disease.
Doctor Chiasson emphasizes that diabetes is affecting more and more people.
The number of patients increases by 6% per year, which means that the rate of diabetics doubles every 15 years.
The World Health Organization subsequently confirmed Dr. Chiasson's projection.
Between 1980 and 2016, according to a report by the UN organization, the number of diabetics quadrupled.
Of this number, there were 2.3 million Canadians affected by diabetes and 880,000 Quebecers.
422 million people suffered from diabetes in 2016.
If these people constituted a country, it would be the third most populous on Earth.
June 6, 2000, Alberta researchers announce their success. All their patients have put away their syringes. No more injections, no more comas.
A quote from Marie-Reine Roy
Report by journalist Marie-Reine Roy and director Denis Chamberland on research carried out at the University of Alberta.
The show Découverte also told us about the medical breakthrough made a little over 20 years ago by a team of researchers from the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
It is the journalist Marie-Reine Roy and the director Denis Chamberland who invite us to explore this medical breakthrough on April 29, 2001.
What the team led by Doctor Ray Rajotte is accomplishing is transplanting cells from the pancreas that produce insulin into the livers of diabetics.
With this transplant, patients could soon stop having to inject this hormone.
The report tells how Doctor Rajotte's team managed to overcome the difficulties linked to this type of transplant.
The transplanted cells eventually die and researchers don't know why.
Doctor Rajotte then decides to seek help from a specialist in transplant rejection, Doctor James Shapiro.
The latter and one of his colleagues analyzed the files of 400 diabetic transplant patients.
They conclude that the culprits of the rejections are steroid-based anti-rejection medications.
The latter, used to protect the kidneys, destroy the cells.
Based on this information, the team of Alberta researchers is reorganizing transplant procedures.
A new cocktail of anti-rejection drugs is invented by Doctor Shapiro.
In addition, we will use live pancreases rather than frozen ones to extract the cells for transplantation.
We will also select subjects who are less seriously ill than previously, but whose lives are still made difficult by diabetes.
The new treatment is very risky.
Two of the three anti-rejection drugs used by Dr. Shapiro are not approved in North America.
There is a possibility that a patient will develop lymphatic cancer.
Despite all this, the University of Alberta team finds eight ideal patients who are willing to face these risks.
On June 6, 2000, she announced her results.
His eight patients put away their syringes.
They didn't no longer injecting insulin to fight diabetes.
News of the discovery quickly made the rounds on television sets around the planet.
Canadian researchers continue to be at the forefront of the fight against diabetes.
For example, in 2014, a team from the Clinical Research Institute of the University of Montreal invented an artificial pancreas that automatically injects the right amount of insulin according to patients' blood sugar levels.
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