Still more severe disease will require oral medications that encourage the pancreas to make more insulin such as glyburide or glipizide Some patients with even more severe type 2 disease are treated with subcutaneous injections of insulin.
Twenty-two years ago Francis Collins, who would go on to head the Human Genome Project and run the National Institutes of Health, was part of a team that found the gene that, when mutated, caused cystic fibrosis, a deadly childhood disease in which the lungs fill with mucus and the pancreas does not make digestive enzymes.