Every good team needs a protein chemist.
The discovery of insulin and its early success in treating patients with diabetes were lauded achievements in Canadian medicine. The next challenge was to make it widely available to those who needed it. Such a task required turning the crude pancreatic extraction into pure and uncontaminated batches of insulin that can be produced in large quantities for patient use.
Dr. Peter J. Moloney was brought in to do just that.
To say that Moloney was productive in his lifetime is an understatement. His illustrious scientific career was well described when he received the Charles Mickle Fellowship in 1964 for having “done the most during the preceding ten years to advance sound knowledge of a practical kind in medical art of science.”
Prior to joining the insulin team, Moloney was instructed by John FitzGerald to “drop everything and start producing diphtheria toxoid,” a task he successfully accomplished and devised into “the Moloney Test” for detecting whether someone has sensitivity to diphtheria. That was not the only thing Moloney had in his namesake; the “Moloney Electrode” was another one of his endeavours – a hydrogen electrode that was able to detect the acidity of bacterial cultures before the invention of the pH metre.
Drawing upon his previous experience working at the federal Department of Agriculture in Ottawa, Moloney developed an approach to purify insulin by using sodium benzoate to hold onto and pull insulin from a pancreatic extract, and then releasing the insulin by dissolving the sodium benzoate in acid. Moloney published these findings in 1923, and the process allowed the Connaught group to produce about 1 litre of insulin per week.
Moloney’s contributions to diabetes research did not stop there. His research interests soon turned to immunology, demonstrating that animals and humans produced immune antibodies that attacked insulin which prevented the body from properly responding to it. He also developed sulphated insulin that was used to treat patients with this kind of insulin resistance. With an impressive longevity, Dr. Moloney published an astounding 84 papers and authored multiple patents, including those for the production of insulin and heparin, with his final patent application filed at the ripe age of 90.
— Written by Angela Zhou