After experimenting with more than a dozen different formulations, drying them with custom-made machinery and heating them in ovens to test shelf life, Nektar hit upon a successful recipe that mixes insulin with glycine (an amino acid), citrate (the salt of an organic acid found in humans) and mannitol (a sugar used in intravenous products).
As we learned from the Atlanta cheating scandal, such administrative discretion is a recipe for fraud, especially when paychecks and career advancement are riding on the test results.