Growth hormone or somatotropin
Growth hormone, GH, also called somatotropin, somatropin is synthesized in and released by the anterior pituitary gland. It consists of a polypeptide of 191 amino acids which contains two disulfide bonds.
It has been used in therapeutics for many years. Initially, it was obtained from extracts of human pituitary glands little time after death, but these pituitary extracts induced the transmission of a neurological disease, of Creutzfeldt-Jakob type. The development of recombinant DNA technique made it possible to obtain a growth hormone deprived in theory of this risk.
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