O Prof. Michio Iwaoka é renomado pesquisador nas áreas de Química Orgânica e Química Biológica com mais de 100 publicações internacionais com ênfase na aplicação da química do selênio em sistemas biológicos.

Título e abstract:

Chemical Synthesis of Insulin via Native Chain Assembly

Michio Iwaoka

Department of Chemistry, School of Science, Tokai University,

Kikakaname, Hiratsuka-shi, Kanagawa 259-1292, Japan

E-mail: miwaoka@tokai.ac.jp

Insulin, an essential hormone to keep blood glucose concentration at an ordinary level after meals, is used as a therapeutic agent for diabetic patients. Since the population of diabetes is increasing worldwide, preparation of various types of functional insulin analogues with a low-cost process is demanded urgently. However, chemical synthesis of insulin has been a difficult challenge for a long time due to its characteristic molecular structure, in which two peptide chains (A and B chains) are connected by two disulfide bridges (SS bonds). Therefore, insulin is currently synthesized by a genetic engineering process, which requires a huge investment of pharmaceutical companies.

We recently reported facile preparation of selenoinsulin, which is an active insulin analogue having one diselenide bridge (SeSe bond) in place of the crosslinking SS bond, just by mixing selenocysteine (Sec)-containing A and B chains without using any protections on the side-chain functional groups. A similar simple method has now been applied for wide-type insulin to obtain the native insulin fold in a reasonable yield. In this lecture, details of our attempt toward easy and high-yield chemical synthesis of insulin via native chain assembly (NCA) will be presented.

1) K. Arai, et al., Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2017, 56, 5522–5526.

2) K. Arai, et al., Communications Chemistry, 2018, 1, 26. [https://rdcu.be/NhUw]