The price of Insulin has soared. These Biohackers have a plan to fix it.
IN A HIP OAKLAND, CALIF., NEIGHBORHOOD, just blocks from cocktail bars and swanky Mexican restaurants, is an enormous warehouse, home to Counter Culture Labs, ground zero for an audacious challenge to the high cost of prescription drugs. In the entryway stands a 1½-story cardboard T. Rex, and inside it’s a bit as if Dr. Frankenstein shared his lab with a hoarder: cluttered shelves hold piles of drying mushrooms, Clorox wipes, wires, kitchen pots, motor oil, two books about Darwin, ropes, a broken alarm clock, a telescoping magnifying glass, a heat gun, a 3-D printer and several jars of clear liquid with tubes running between them. One shelf holds plastic bins labeled LAB COATS, PAINT & BRUSHES and EBOLA SUITS.
A group of professional scientists and amateur tinkerers founded Counter Culture Labs in 2013 with the goal of bringing biotechnology to the masses. At any time, it hosts dozens of projects; when I visit in July, there’s one whose objective is to make “vegan cheese” using yeast.
The Open Insulin Project has bigger plans. The group wants to reverse engineer how the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies produce insulin and then turn over the instructions to the public. In theory, anyone with a bit of cash could then build a DIY lab in their garage and make open-source insulin.
Currently three companies—Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi—control most of the world’s $27 billion insulin market, using a complicated web of regulations and patents to keep a hold on it. Open Insulin wants to rebuild it with no megacorporations and no profit. The project is probably months, if not years, away from actually making medical-grade insulin, but its objective is as much political as it is production-oriented: bringing a sharp focus to the stratospheric price of insulin and, more broadly, the predatory pricing of prescription drugs in the U.S.
