Insulin

Insulin is a peptide hormone that lowers blood glucose by promoting glucose uptake and storage while coordinating metabolism in several tissues.

Insulin receptor: A cell-surface receptor tyrosine kinase that binds insulin and activates intracellular signaling. Insulin binding starts the signaling cascade that changes how target cells handle nutrients.
Blood glucose: The concentration of glucose circulating in the blood. Insulin’s best-known effect is lowering this circulating fuel concentration.
Diabetes mellitus: A group of metabolic disorders characterized by chronic hyperglycemia caused by inadequate insulin secretion, impaired insulin action, or both. Insulin deficiency or resistance underlies the major forms of this disorder.
Frederick Banting: Canadian surgeon who co-led the research that isolated insulin for therapeutic use in 1921–1922. Banting helped direct the experiments that made insulin treatment possible.
Insulin resistance: A reduced cellular response to insulin that leads the body to require more hormone to produce some metabolic effects. It shows how normal insulin concentrations can fail to control metabolism effectively.
PI3K–AKT pathway: An intracellular signaling pathway that regulates metabolism, growth, and survival through phosphoinositide 3-kinase and AKT. This pathway carries much of insulin’s metabolic signal inside cells.
Pancreatic islets: Clusters of hormone-producing cells in the pancreas, including insulin-secreting beta cells and glucagon-secreting alpha cells. These islets coordinate insulin release with other hormones that regulate glucose.
Insulin therapy: Treatment using administered insulin to control blood glucose in people who cannot produce or use enough of their own. Therapy replaces or supplements the hormone when endogenous regulation is insufficient.
Charles Best: Canadian medical scientist who worked with Frederick Banting on the early isolation of insulin. Best carried out key laboratory work in the discovery effort.
Metabolic syndrome: A cluster of conditions including central obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and elevated blood glucose that raises cardiovascular risk. Insulin resistance often links its metabolic abnormalities.

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