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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @08:50PM
"I want that" doesn't mean you have a right to it or will get it.
If we ban those high prices, the drugs would not likely be discovered and would certainly not undergo the required testing.
So the alternative to high prices is that there is no drug.
I guess this makes you happy? While dying due to lack of the drug, you can be comforted by knowing that well-off people are dying with you. You won't have anybody to be jealous of. Everybody suffers, not just the poor. Yay communism!