Medical reseacher helped develop synthetic insulin
Arthur D. Riggs, a medical researcher whose experiments with recombinant DNA led to the development of synthetic insulin for diabetes patients and helped launch the biotechnology industry, died March 23 at a hospital in Duarte, California. He was 82.
His death was announced by the City of Hope, a medical center and research institute in Duarte with which Dr. Riggs was affiliated for more than 50 years. The cause was lymphoma.
Dr. Riggs, a native of Modesto, California, who was trained as a biochemist, had an interest in genetic modification and, as early as 1968, proposed a theory that the emerging science might be useful in treating diabetes.
He made his most significant work in a groundbreaking 1977 experiment in collaboration with other scientists, most prominently Keiichi Itakura, also from City of Hope, and Herbert Boyer, who had left the University of California at San Francisco to launch the biotechnology company Genentech.
Led by Dr. Riggs, the researchers sought to develop a synthetic gene called somatostatin, a mammalian hormone. Working backward from the protein structure, which had 14 amino acid components, Dr. Riggs and Itakura reverse-engineered somatostatin’s genetic code. They refined their experiments to make the process more effective.
The key discovery was not the gene itself but the method used to create it in a laboratory.
“It was the first humandesigned and man-made gene that functioned in any organism,” Dr. Riggs said in a 2010 interview with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It was the first mammalian hormone produced in bacteria, and it jump-started the biotechnology industry.”
Dr. Riggs, Ikatura and Boyer then turned their attention to insulin, a hormone that controls blood sugar levels and is particularly crucial to people with diabetes. Insulin was a more complex hormone, with 51 proteins and two polypeptide chains that had to be connected, but the scientists simply applied the technique they had already developed for somatostatin.
They succeeded in creating synthetic insulin in 1978. Within four years, Genentech had formed a partnership with the pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly to market synthetic insulin under the brand name Humulin.
It proved to be a lifesaving development for millions of people with diabetes, and it meant that insulin no longer had to be extracted from animals.
“We chose insulin because it looked doable, and there was a need,” Dr. Riggs said. “At the time, diabetics were being treated with cow insulin because there was no source of human insulin. And cow insulin resulted in a high rate of allergic reactions.”
The genetic technique that Dr. Riggs and Itakura developed, using recombinant DNA, is also the technological foundation of monoclonal antibodies, a therapy widely used in treating cancer, autoimmune disorders, macular degeneration, COVID-19 and other disorders.
Dr. Riggs had patents on his developments, but he resisted all offers to join biotech companies, choosing instead to stay at City of Hope. He published hundreds of research papers but gave almost no interviews to news organi