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Open Insulin, 'DIY bio' and the future of pharma
The development, manufacture and sale of pharmaceutical drugs in the United States is a complex landscape involving intellectual property and strict federal regulations. But according to Colorado State University scientists, the status quo of the U.S. pharmaceutical market may soon be turned on its head. That's due in part to a growing community of do-it-yourself "biohackers" who are disrupting business-as-usual for pharmaceutical discovery, development and distribution. A Sept. 13 perspective piece in Trends in Biotechnology [DOI: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2018.07.009] [DX] frames these emerging issues, and predicts how the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. regulatory environment, will need to change in response.
[...] The authors use the California-based Open Insulin Project as a case study of how the DIY bio movement might shape the future of medicine. Founded in 2015, the project's creators are trying to increase competition in the insulin market by developing and releasing an open-source protocol for manufacturing off-patent insulin.
Why does the Open Insulin Project exist in the first place? Insulin is 100 years old, but it remains prohibitively expensive for many patients, with some uninsured patients paying up to $400 a month for this life-saving medicine. People are angry, and in some cases, people are dying, from lack of access to affordable insulin.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday September 18 2018, @12:52PM (29 children)
Someone or something paid for your insulin. If the manufacturing costs were cheaper, there's more money that could be spent on a park or something.
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(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @01:17PM (8 children)
I'd much rather see my tax money pay for someones insulin than bomb some foreign country.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @03:19PM (4 children)
Fear not, some of your tax dollars are diverted from the military that insures this country continues to exist and into programs that give free insulin to illegal immigrants.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 18 2018, @04:52PM (2 children)
You seem to think that would be worse than spending money on bombs?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 18 2018, @08:49PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @01:43AM
Why is there no Bazinga!! mod?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @05:56PM
You prok bellied fool, no one is saying zero military. I suspect you are trolling so ill just exit this thread after plopping my sweaty junk on your head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @05:44PM (1 child)
It's hard to take the high road when you freeload off of countries that are on the hook to defend you. It's like the young man from an independently wealthy family working for a charity for free because he couldn't stand to sully himself by taking money for that work. If you owned up to your responsibilities you'd find more of those tax dollars would have to be spent in non-sanctimonious ways.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @06:52PM
God damn you military die-hards are nuts. Do we need a massive military to prop up our Empire? Yes. Do we need to spend quite so much on it? NONONONO and NO! The cost/benefit algorithm has been superseded in your brain by a piece of tri-colored cloth and I would guess a bit of personal investment in the pork machine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @08:43PM
It's simple evolution in action. Unless the person needing insulin is sterilized, we're breeding sickly people who will not do well when we go all Venezuela.
Bombing gets rid of our competition. It's how we win.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aiwarrior on Tuesday September 18 2018, @01:22PM (4 children)
The problem is
What is cheaper?
A decentralized small volume buyer vs A centralized volume buyer
What is cheaper?
An amputated citizen and or even a minimal hospitalization for diabetes vs Help the person with a very simple medicine so he can be productive.
We are not talking about Hepatitis C here, and even there, there may be a case....
Morality vs Economics/Math
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 18 2018, @01:31PM (3 children)
It's possible that the DIY bio crowd will come up with an absolutely cheaper method of making the insulin. In which case the official producers can adopt that method and scale it up. Or maybe it will only be significantly cheaper because they are skipping safety and quality control checks, and there's lower transportation costs (when made in your home or locally), etc.
Whatever the case, the Open Insulin Project and others like it can't be stopped. Only driven underground, like other biologists and chemists (except there is much more sympathy for someone making cheap insulin than cheap meth, so they could probably distribute it without getting ratted out).
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(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Tuesday September 18 2018, @01:52PM (1 child)
I am with you on this, this is good. Competition is good, if it fails its part of life.
This is where the actual philosophy and morality enter: Is the US system, with it's Darwinism always going to come out on top of the game? Perhaps. Is it worth it?
One of my current philosophical dilemmas.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 19 2018, @11:54AM
We should ask why the US system ended on top in the first place? Second, the US health care system is screwed up despite significant attempts to make it less Darwinian. These attempts have often backfired badly (such as creating the oligopoly situation with insulin).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday September 18 2018, @01:56PM
Or more likely, it will cost twice as much to make but without the rapacious markup, will only cost 1/10th as much to the end user.
The market is broken.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @01:25PM (6 children)
I'm not the AC above, but my guess is he was referring to the obesity rate in the US. His insulin is free because his own pancreas produces it.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 18 2018, @01:52PM (4 children)
Pancreas - the enemy of diabetes research and the profi... no, scratch that - and the jobs.
Big Pharma should lobby for regulation imposing the surgical removal of the pancreas immediately after birth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @03:22PM (1 child)
Obesity is only a risk factor.
Once my glucose was controlled (type 2), my weight rapidly plummeted (down 85 lbs so far, and still dropping) with no change of diet nor lifestyle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @05:47PM
Just make sure you're confident it is diabetes. A co-worker of mine had his blood sugar go crazy and he was on various diabetes-related medications. It turned out that he had pancreatic cancer and the cancer was squeezing his pancreas causing his blood sugar to go all over the place.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 18 2018, @04:56PM
Your ISP and your mobile phone provider will be fighting over those vital organs with marketable value. The resale market in used organs will still harm the profits of Big Pharma.
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(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday September 19 2018, @12:53AM
Monty Python [youtube.com] didn't intend the movie to be a documentary or user manual..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @02:13PM
Isn't obesity only a risk factor for Type 2 diabetes (many of which don't use insulin)? Most/all Type 1 diabetics require insulin and I don't believe obesity is a related factor.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by isostatic on Tuesday September 18 2018, @03:57PM (6 children)
http://imgur.com/giZOXqel.png [imgur.com]
It's not hard to manufacture cheaper insulin, all the other countries manage to do it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 18 2018, @04:09PM (3 children)
How much of the price is due to socialized medicine? What about packaging and shipping costs on top of the manufacturing costs?
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 18 2018, @04:58PM
Amazon seems to have reasonable packaging and shipping costs.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Bobs on Tuesday September 18 2018, @06:16PM
FYI: compare the price for the same bottle of insulin in Canada vs. USA:
Canada ~$52
USA ~$250
Product from the same company.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday September 18 2018, @09:54PM
I live in a country with proper civilised socialist medicine, and from what I understand the national drug buying agency offers potential suppliers a "take it or leave it" price for anything that is not under a patent, and as they can easily work out the cost of manufacture, that price is very, very low.
There will be multiple manufacturers world wide, so if they are offered a supply contract for (say) 12 months, with guaranteed volumes, the small margin is probably no big deal.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Wednesday September 19 2018, @01:02AM (1 child)
Where do those numbers come from? I used to take Lantus and Humalog and both had a cash price of $750/vial.
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(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday September 19 2018, @09:38AM
https://professional.diabetes.org/files/media/Changing_Cost_Insulin.pdf [diabetes.org]
There is a deluded view by proponents of the American health care system that everyone else pays the same price as americans but it's hidden in their taxes.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Wednesday September 19 2018, @01:07AM
Insulin *used* to cost $20/bottle as recently as about 2002, right here in the good old USA. Back then I had a really sketchy individual insurance plan that didn't cover drugs and I paid cash for it.
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