I still have no idea how people can get away with charging several thousand dollars for a milligram of recombinant protein. That's an amount that you can see with the naked eye, if your eyesight is really good, but even then, you can see it only just barely. If you had to make a recombinant protein in your undergraduate biology class, then you know that the cost of doing this is essentially the cost of highly refined sugar water (= culture media) plus the cost of highly refined salt water (= chromatography buffers).

The protections of the closed-source biologics vending industry are actually thin as paper and brittle as glass. For most of this stuff, they have no patents, no copyright, no government regulations, hardly a lobby to speak of, and no monopolies of any kind. They manage to lock biotechnology away from new entrants and to keep the cost of doing science in the stratosphere for establishment professionals, solely through the physical possession of the source DNA and by imposing contractual restrictions on those willing to sign them.

I have synthesized, manufactured, tested, and fully validated a collection of open source plasmids [small circular DNA strands] coding for some of the very basic building blocks of biotechnology. I do charge an initial purchase price to pay for storage, ongoing quality control, and the provision of a reliable source of these molecules. But there is no proprietary barrier of any type on their use. You may grow them on your own, modify them, give them to others, sell them, sell products derived from them, and do whatever you (legally) want to do with them.