Here’s a name you should know, but probably don’t.  Arthur D. Riggs.

If you are like me, you recall Dr. Herbert Boyer.  Boyer left UCSF (University of California, San Francisco) to form Genentech, one of the first biotech companies.

Well, it was Boyer, Riggs, and Keiichi Itakura that developed somatostatin some 45 years ago.   They had reverse engineered the mammalian hormone (14 amino acid components), but it wasn’t very stable.  So they merged it with a larger protein to make it more so.

But the process they developed was critical.  While it was produced in a bacterium, somatostatin functioned in almost any organism.  And, from there, they decided to work on insulin.  More complex, with some 51 proteins and polypeptide chains, the process they developed for somatostatin was the key to their development of the synthetic insulin.  Which they completed in 1978.  By 1982, Genentech and Eli Lilly were marketing the product as Humulin.

That also meant that insulin no longer needed to be extracted from animals (most commonly pigs, which was a real problem for Jewish diabetics- or from cows).  That also meant that many folks who needed the insulin were subject to allergic reactions.

And it gets better.  This process, using recombinant DNA, led to the production of monoclonal antibodies.  Those are the keys for treating cancer, autoimmune disorders, macular degeneration, even COVID-19!

Arthur Riggs never joined the biotech industry, content to remain affiliated with the City of Hope, a med/research institute in Duarte (CA) for more than 50 years. Which is why you probably have no idea who he was or how he helped change the world for the better.

(The California Supreme Court finally ruled that Genentech owed the City of Hope some $ 300 million in damages for breach of contract re: royalties- after a 12 y battle.)

Riggs got his degree in Chemistry from UC Riverside (1961) and his PhD from Caltech in 1966.  After a stint at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (San Diego), he joined the City of Hope in 1969.   He not only joined the City of Hope, he managed to convert it to the prominent research facility it became, headed up its Beckman Research Institute, and was the founding dean of its graduate school.  Oh- and Dr. Riggs had bequeathed some $310 million over his lifetime, most of it to the City of Hope.

When he finally stepped down (at the young age of 81 in 2020, the Diabetes & Metabolism Research Institute was named after him.  But he worked almost up until his date of death last month.

Synthetic Insulin and Monoclonal Antibodies.  Not a bad legacy.

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