Open Insulin Project Could Help Save Thousands Of Lives And Billions Of Dollars

from the public-health,-public-domain dept

Techdirt has written a few times about the pharmaceutical industry's use of "evergreening", whereby small, sometimes trivial, changes are made to drugs in order to extend their effective patent life. It turns out the technique is applied to one of the most widely-used drugs of all, insulin:

There are currently about 387 million people worldwide living with diabetes. Meanwhile, as discussed by Jeremy A. Greene and Kevin R. Riggs in their March 2015 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, there is no generic insulin available on the market despite great demand in poorer communities and regions of the world. As a result, many go without insulin and suffer complications including blindness, cardiovascular disease, amputations, nerve and kidney damage, and even death. Pharmaceutical companies patent small modifications to previous insulins while withdrawing those previous versions from the market to keep prices up.

The obvious solution is to produce a generic version of insulin that can be sold cheaply enough that nobody dies or suffers complications simply because they cannot afford Big Pharma's hefty price tags. That's just what the Open Insulin project, with its crowdfunding page, aims to do:

A team of biohackers is developing the first open source protocol to produce insulin simply and economically. Our work may serve as a basis for generic production of this life-saving drug and provide a firmer foundation for continued research into improved versions of insulin.

As well as making insulin more readily available to those in the poorer communities, the Open Insulin project could save Western countries huge sums too. As an article in Popular Science explains:

Since there are no generic versions available in the United States, insulin is very expensive -- that cost was likely a large proportion of the $176 billion in medical expenditures incurred by diabetes patients in 2012 alone.

Any project that could help save thousands of lives and billions of dollars would be noteworthy. What makes Open Insulin even more remarkable is that it is operating on a shoestring -- the initial crowdsourcing target was just $6,000, already surpassed -- and that it intends to put all its results in the open:

All protocols we develop and discoveries generated by our research will be freely available in the public domain. We will also be proactively investigating strategies to protect the open status of our work.

However, it's important to keep those exciting prospects in perspective. The Popular Science article includes a comment from the Kevin Riggs mentioned in the Open Insulin quotation above. He doesn't believe that Open Insulin on its own will be enough to bring a generic insulin drug to the market:

"I don't think the major hurdle is that the companies don't know how to make insulin, because that part is reasonably straightforward," he says. "The real hurdles are getting the drug approved by the FDA (and since insulin is a biologic drug, it requires a lot more original data than an application for a small-molecule generic would), and then upfront manufacturing costs (because making a biologic drug is different, so it requires different equipment)." He suspects that it will take "an altruistic entity with a lot of start-up money" to make generic insulin commercially available.

That may be so, but at least the Open Insulin project is doing something in an attempt to change the status quo that sees huge numbers of people suffering unnecessarily. In any case, Open Insulin is a wonderful demonstration of how much biohacking has advanced, allowing suitably-skilled people to make potentially important contributions to global health. Let's hope it does eventually lead to a generic insulin that can be made available around the world very cheaply.

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Filed Under: big pharma, diabetes, drug prices, generic insulin, insulin, open insulin, patents, pharmaceutical pricing

DailyDirt: Life Finds A Way...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are more common than many people think. Diabetics nowadays who rely on insulin shots aren't getting their medicine from pigs/cows or other mammals -- and haven't been for decades. Modern sources of insulin come from vats of genetically engineered bacteria. So what about GMOs and GMO-produced products in our food supply? Most Americans have definitely eaten some GMO food, but is there any end to GMO experimentation in the wild now?

• In France, a lamb that was genetically modified with jellyfish DNA got into the retail food chain -- and some people have probably eaten it without knowing. This wasn't an accident, apparently. A disgruntled worker (and possibly some co-workers) purposely sold a lab animal to a slaughterhouse. It's probably not going to kill anyone, but this is how the dinosaurs get out of Jurassic Park World, IRL. [url]
• In 2013, the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) found genetically engineered wheat in Oregon -- where it shouldn't have been. Since then, there has been some concern that more GMO wheat is growing in the wild without anyone knowing.... [url]
• You can thank GMOs for making billions of pounds of cheese sold today (ie. most of the cheese you see in US stores). Fermentation-Produced Chymosin (FPC) is used instead of a calf stomach extract -- and it just wouldn't be possible to make as much cheese as we do without FPC (unless the veal industry suddenly exploded). [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: bacteria, biotech, cheese, dna, food, fpc, gmo, insulin, jurassic park, usda, veal, wheat

DailyDirt: It's The Yeast I Can Do...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Genetically engineered organisms already produce some highly valuable products for us. Insulin used to be harvested from the pancreases of pigs, but now stockpiles of human insulin can be made using a fermentation process with bio-engineered bacteria. Various kinds of yeast can produce different kinds of breads and beers, but if we can modify these tiny organisms at will, yeast could produce an incredibly wide variety of products. Just check out these links on the versatility of yeast.

• The next version of Breaking Bad won't need a desperate chemistry teacher, but maybe a biology undergrad and some genetically modified yeast. Brewing all kinds of pharmaceutical drugs with bioengineered yeast could make drug synthesis remarkably inexpensive... and hard to police. [url]
• Researchers have created a yeast that is sensitive to magnetic fields, and this work could lead to other kinds of organisms engineered to have magnetic sensing abilities. Magnetic yeast cells can grow into arbitrary patterns shaped by external magnetic fields, and this ability could be employed in advanced bio-engineering processes. [url]
• Under current FDA rules, if a flavor chemical comes from a plant, animal, or edible yeast, then it can be labeled "natural" on food packaging. How natural would flavors really be if they were produced by genetically engineered yeast? Designer yeasts can produce flavors such as vanilla, saffron, and grapefruit -- and more flavors and fragrances are being developed. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: bacteria, chemistry, drugs, flavors, gmo, insulin, life, magnetic yeast, microbiology, pharmaceuticals, yeast

DailyDirt: Diets That Work...?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some people think losing weight is simple: just eat less. But that formula isn't as easy to put into practice as it sounds. There are also various arguments that overeating is triggered by the foods we eat or by hormonal changes that are not under conscious control. Researchers are studying a variety of variables that effect weight loss/gain and associated symptoms, and here are just a few interesting links on the research for fighting fat.

• The Nutritional Science Initiative (NuSI) is an organization dedicated to improving the quality of research for nutrition and obesity. NuSI is currently looking to clarify the root causes of obesity (and related conditions), determining what makes people obese: overeating itself or hormonal/biochemical triggers that cause overeating. [url]
• Consuming seaweed enriched toast seemed to get some people to subsequently eat 179 fewer calories for the rest of the day. The seaweed was ground up and added to the bread without affecting the taste, and it apparently acts as a bulking agent in the stomach to make people feel full. [url]
• Is snacking at night worse than eating the same thing in the morning? Possibly. It might not just be what you eat, but when you eat it. [url]
• Marijuana smokers tend to eat more than 600 extra calories in a day, but for some reason, they have slimmer waists, higher levels of HDL and lower insulin levels and insulin resistance. So if you needed another reason to smoke pot, it's possibly a treatment for obesity and diabetes.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: calories, diets, food, hdl, hunger, insulin, insulin resistance, marijuana, nusi, nutrition, obesity, seaweed, smokers, snacking

TSA Confiscates Pregnant Woman's Insulin, Ice Packs

from the how-nice-of-them dept

DogBoy alerts us to the latest in customer service niceties from your friendly TSA agents. A pregnant woman, travelling alone via Denver International Airport, had her insulin and ice packs confiscated after TSA agents claimed they were a threat. The items were properly labeled and the woman had the requisite doctor's note. When asked why they were doing this, the TSA agent claimed that such things were "a risk":

"He's like, 'Well, you're a risk.' I'm like, 'Excuse me?' And he's like, 'This is a risk ... I can't tell you why again. But this is at risk for explosives,'” the woman said.

In typical TSA denial fashion, it has issued an apology... while also suggesting the woman is lying:

“We talked to all of our people and they didn’t touch her insulin," said TSA spokeswoman Pat Ahlstrom.

Ahlstrom said ice packs are only allowed if they’re completely frozen and the woman’s were not.

Filed Under: insulin, tsa