9 ms·

Biohackers Creating Open-Source Insulin

190 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

snewk 11y ago
Member of the project here; Since we have already met our target $ for phase I, we opened up a stretch goal to fund phase II. We are in the early stages of establishing the protocols for cutting and folding the proinsulin into its final, active form, and are looking into purification methods sufficient for research and potential pharmaceutical use. Meeting stretch goals will help us purchase the reagents and equipment necessary to execute these protocols.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  I have a really hard time taking this project serious. Plenty of people in my surroundings have diabetes so I can see the impact would be huge. If you asked for a few million then I would find it a lot more believable than the amounts that are requested in the crowdfunding campaigns. If someone asked for $25000 to build the next electric car I'd not believe them either, there is more to making the next electric car in terms of process and design than being able to buy a battery and some motors.
  - snewk 11y ago
    Check out my replies in the other thread.
  - codingdave 11y ago
    You seem to be confusing the effort to make a prototype with the effort of scaling to production. Prototyping has smaller costs.
jacquesm 11y ago
That's on first glance a really nice project and goal but $12K to create a generic insulin is not going to cut it. That will barely get you a kitchen, not a laboratory that will produce something that will pass FDA approval after you spend a very large multiple of that on tests.
- snewk 11y ago
  There are already multiple lab spaces online with many active members participating in this project. As far as FDA trials go, it is something currently outside the scope of this campaign. This is from the crowdfunding page: " $6,000 is needed to initiate Phase I of the project. In Phase I, the team will insert an optimized DNA sequence for insulin into E. coli bacteria, induce the bacteria to express insulin precursors, and verify that human proinsulin has been produced. If we raise more than the minimum required for Phase I, we will proceed to establish the protocols for cutting and folding the proinsulin into its final, active insulin form, and develop purification methods sufficient for research and potential pharmaceutical use. 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. "
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    That still seems incredibly cheap to me. On another note, I'd be happy to back your campaign (I'd see it as contributing to your education rather than that I would expect you to succeed but that's just my totally un-informed opinion), but the requirement for becoming a backer are apparently that one signs up or uses facebook and that's a bridge I will not cross for any good cause. Is there some other way I can contribute?
    - snewk 11y ago
      It is indeed a low number as far as science research goes. It's pretty staggering how inexpensive experimenting with DNA can be. Recent advances in DNA synthesis are outpacing Moore's Law. Creating genetic constructs for insulin is also cheaper because insulin itself is a relatively simple protein. And fortunately there are also a ton of extremely qualified people on the team who seem to love working for free. EDIT: you shouldnt need to use facebook. you can sign up for experiment .com with just an email addy.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        I don't want to sign up for anything, I want to back your campaign. If your project has a direct way of receiving some funds let me know, email address in my profile.
ZLeviathan 11y ago
guys, please tweet or share this news to your friends.
eveningcoffee 11y ago
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. Well, the report itself says: prescription medications to treat complications of diabetes (18%) So this is up to $31.68 billion in 2012. I will assume for simplification that all of it goes for insulin. There are about 20 million patients in US (according to http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/ http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/). So this puts us into $100-150 in a month range for the insulin.
- cperciva 11y ago
  I'm not sure which report you're looking at, but "prescription medications to treat complications of diabetes" means things like painkillers for neuropathy, antibiotics for infections, et cetera. Insulin falls under "antidiabetic agents", which treat diabetes itself, not the complications. But most of the 20 million diabetics in the US are type 2 and do not require insulin; it's only Type 1s and the most severe cases Type 2s who take insulin.
  - mikeyouse 11y ago
    The CDC keeps pretty good stats, as of 2011, there were about 6 million diabetics taking insulin; http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/meduse/fig1.htm http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/meduse/fig1.htm
- RHSeeger 11y ago
  Just throwing in my experience/numbers, for those interested. I'm a type 1 diabetic (for ~30 years) and take Apidra (short acting) and Lantus (long acting) daily. I use about 5 vials of each per 3 months. I "think" the cost of each vial, if I was paying sticker price, would be about $250.00. So... 2 * 5 * 250 / 3 = $833 / month As it turns out, there's several mitigating factors: 1. I have insurance, so I pay much less than that 2. For those without insurance, the insulin creator has programs to help such people pay for the insurance (discounts for some, max out-of-pocket for others)
ZLeviathan 11y ago
truly remarkable only if it's real...
kevindeasis 11y ago
https://experiment.com/projects/open-insulin https://experiment.com/projects/open-insulin
fabian2k 11y ago
My impression is that the production of biological drugs (as opposed to small molecules) is simply more expensive on a large scale. There isn't as much potential to save costs as with small molecule generic drugs. This seems to be a small-scale expression and optimization, and I'd guess that this is not the expensive part of developing a generic insulin. Large-scale manufacturing and making sure you're producing the correct molecule reliable, and then demonstrating that to the FDA are probably orders of magnitude more expensive.
kgwgk 11y ago
> Since there are no generic versions available in the United States, insulin is very expensive I don't know if that might qualify as very expensive but one can get one month worth of insulin for $50. http://theperfectd.com/2014/10/23/type1-diabetes-no-insurance-how-little-can-you-pay/ http://theperfectd.com/2014/10/23/type1-diabetes-no-insuranc...
cant_kant 11y ago
"Kevin Riggs, an instructor in medicine at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored an article about generic insulin earlier this year, doesn't think that Open Insulin 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).” "
mdup 11y ago
I remember reading in another HN thread about insulins (too lazy to search it right now) that plenty of prototype insulins have been developed, but most of them could cause nasty diseases, notably cancer. Hence only a low number of well-tested commercial insulins have been pushed to the market. Does someone knowledgeable have more info about those "good" vs. "bad" insulins?
- snewk 11y ago
  biologically produced insulin starts as a monomeric protein (meaning it only consists of one string of amino acids) called preproinsulin. this amino acid chain must interact with itself to form stabilizing interactions and disulfide bonds. once these disulfide linkages are created, this insulin precursor undergoes a multi step enzymatic cleavage which cuts off some bits and makes biologically active insulin. There are many ways to create insulin synthetically, and some of them lead to product contaminated with misfolded proteins. Misfolded proteins may have no effect, but sometimes they can activate the IGF-1 signal pathway which has been associated with cancer. There is also a chance of an autoimmmune reaction to the misfolded insulin, which would also be very bad. We are exploring a few different methods for our insulin production specifically with this concern in mind.
  - ff7c11 11y ago
    Misfolded proteins also cause Alzheimer's disease. They are the number one reason why cannibalism is bad. If you eat a human brain with misfolded human proteins (prions) it can cause your proteins to misfold. I think.
    - snewk 11y ago
      Yes, misfolded prion proteins(PrPsc) can 'infect' other correctly folded prion proteins(PrPc). Prions are glycoproteins found on the surface of cells, and they affect cell signaling from the exterior of a cell to the interior. Insulin, on the other hand, is a free floating small molecule not anchored to a cell. Misfolded insulin is not 'infectious' like PrPsc. The biological role of prions is still not well known, but one reason prion diseases are such a big deal is that prions are resistant to normal biological protein degredation. They are hard buggers to get rid of. Unlike insulin, which has a specific protease enzyme which breaks it down.
cant_kant 11y ago
Here is an price from an Indian site "Actrapid Insulin, Neutral 40IU x 1mL 10ml Actrapid VIAL 145.00 " http://www.drugsupdate.com/brand/showavailablebrands/830/1 http://www.drugsupdate.com/brand/showavailablebrands/830/1 That is $2.19 according to xe.com and is a branded version made by Novo Nordisk. So if you use 40 units a day, it would be less than $7 a month. Greater regulation, higher wages and higher occupational health and safety standards keep the price higher in the US.
- dnautics 11y ago
  it's not regulation, occupational health, and safety standards that keep the price higher. Drugs sold in india have just about as good standards as in the US. If it's made by Novo Nordisk, it probably comes out of the same plant that supplies the US supply. Even Indian generics manufacturers get themselves certified by the FDA because they want the lucrative US market.
  - melling 11y ago
    Now if we could only convince India to move upmarket and develop new drugs instead of simply making generics. India would be richer and their population of 1.3 billion people would greatly benefit, as would little countries like the United States.
ff7c11 11y ago
Not going to happen. "Biohacking" is 100% hype. 0% science. On insulin specifically: http://blog.indysci.org/insulin-is-hard-but-not-impossible/ http://blog.indysci.org/insulin-is-hard-but-not-impossible/
- erkkie 11y ago
  Biohacking is 100% gonna happen, probably sooner than later. Trying to pretend otherwise is ignoring all the technologies becoming available on a ramen budget.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    And also ignoring all the commercial pharmaceuticals whose prices are being jacked up by orders of magnitude with no warning. Martin Skreli can make the mainstream news by jacking up the price of anti-infection drug pyrimethamine by 5555%. Cycloserine can go up 2160%. Isoproterenol, nitroprusside, tetracycline, and doxycycline went up abruptly. When your quality of life, or even the remaining duration of it, is largely in the hands of a few executives at a single company, it's generally a good move to do whatever is necessary to reduce your dependence on them, before they realize that they can bleed you dry--along with those like you--with a few keystrokes in their inventory system. It is inevitable that people made desperate by medical circumstance will do dangerous things with biology on a shockingly low budget. For instance, did you know that some people are doing at-home fecal transplants using thrift-store blenders and over-the-counter enema kits? How long do you think it will be before someone tries converting cells in their intestinal lining into beta cells, or implanting an artificial pancreas made from their own cells? It is very likely that any successes will be unknown, while the first person to inadvertently kill himself while attempting to cure his own diseases with garage-scale biotech will be criticized and demonized worldwide. And that will be the spark falling on dry tinder, as people realize that the cost of biohacking is now low enough to be within reach of ordinary people.
- cinquemb 11y ago
  As someone who works in neuro lab who occasionally reads about "Neurohacking" I could easily dismiss it as 100% hype, but I won't (although I do call out when someone talks to me about any of the devices on the market having seen manufactures come through our lab and try to peddle their… stuff). "A lot of biohackers (even PhD level biohackers ensconced in academia) are basically script kiddies – cut and paste these bits of DNA and cross your fingers and hope the result you expect pops out." Same is true of Neuro phds: "scan brains in fmri/eeg that i have no idea how it works from a physics perspective", run this matlab script here, use this proprietary software there, calculate "connectivity|power|correlation" - "does this look good for my paper? yes, shiny grant coming right up! Will it move the field forward? Not anymore than the thousand other papers out there but the university pr office is on it!" (in no particular order). I say this because if all this was more out in the open (methods, software, caveats on every level on a git repo) and more available to people in other fields/expertise to look at and source materials and parts, a lot could be moved forward in general from what I'm observing going on in academia now along the lines of: "As I worked on insulin in grad school, I risked my job as a lowly postdoc, chiming in and pointedly telling him (in front of the program manager) why it wouldn’t work. Some of my coworkers speculated that I might not show up the next day, but I survived to tell the tale." I see some well intentioned people fumbling around, being derided in private by academics (who play the same human status games in different ways) who are still willing to talk with such people (because $$$, and maybe because some other academic they "collaborate" with is talking with them), who are pretty smart in their field (who are finding alternative funding sources!) who I secretly hope burn a fire under the ass of what goes now, so I won't write it all off.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
unknown_apostle 11y ago
I don't understand this. So just one question: if it's that simple, why hasn't the market done it yet?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Because there's no(t enough) profit in it? Markets don't always create the stuff we need, even if they're not full of safety regulations because stuff that's being made is dangerous.
replicatorblog 11y ago
I worked in diabetes for a decade so thought I'd chime in. This is an admirable project with very low prospects of making a difference in the lives of people with diabetes. I don't doubt this group will be able to show "success" in the form of simple clinical results. I have the highest doubts that they'd have the resources to do the broad-based clinical trials required to go to market. Look up "Eroom's Law" which is "Moore's Law" spelled backwards: http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1.html http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1.... Basically, the increases in pharma regulation means it takes longer and gets more expensive to create a new drug each year. This is a cool science project, but the reporting around it is sensational and not helpful to the millions of people with diabetes who have their cranks yanked regularly about miracle cures, cost-saving fantasies, etc. To address some raised in sub-threads: + You can get extraordinarily cheap drugs in India, the rest of the developing world, and in parts of Europe. The "greedy" drug companies adjust pricing to what local markets can bear. So instead of letting poor people die en masse they mark the drugs down and pass the cost onto the developed world. Fair trade IMO. + The reason there are so few generic insulins is that they are hard to make consistently enough to please the FDA and European regulators. Companies like Teva and Perrigo are multi-billion dollar manufacturers of generic drugs who would love to get get into this game, but as noted, biosimilar drugs, especially ones as powerful as insulins, are a lot harder to copy than aspirin.
- EmlynC 11y ago
  This is a really solid response. I'm a Pharmacologist and I've worked in a number of Biotechs. I have been part of pricing discussions to value our drugs and your assessment is correct — price discrimination, as in most industries, is based on what a particular market can bear. Factors that influence this are the way that healthcare systems are run (i.e. public healthcare, insurance based), the cost of compliance and competition. I wouldn't say that the industry subsidises poor countries via sales in the developed world, it's more a case of it's better to be paid something rather than be paid nothing. I personally, however, do like the happy side-effect this has for patients in poor countries. Increased regulation costs more to comply with and that cost of course is born by the consumer. The cost of regulatory compliance also varies on the market you sell to, the US being one of the most expensive. Just as with software or hardware, the price reflects the cost of production and maintaining the product. Notably with biologics (Insulin, any hormone ...) as opposed to small chemical entity (paracetamol, aspirin etc) is that broadly they are harder to keep in their stable active form. The are heat sensitive, chemically sensitive and have a tendency to stick to themselves. This tends to increase the cost of storage, logistics and compliance. It also means that if you can make a worthwhile biologic it will generally experience less competition.
mentos 11y ago
> “Every year it gets so much easier and cheaper to do genetic engineering.” Is there a hand on the doomsday clock for biological engineering?
protonpopsicle 11y ago
I have type 1. In an emergency situation, when demand outweighs supply for life-saving drugs, I would think it useful that there be recipes available online for ambitious DIYers. I think about this from time-to-time since since reading Alas, Babylon in which the diabetic characters are the first to die (maybe I'm too paranoid).
- refurb 11y ago
  If the situation is an emergency, would you really have time to make a drug yourself? Even the simplest drug takes a long time to make.
refurb 11y ago
I'll have to admit it's a pretty cool project, but if you want to create a cheap source of insulin, you're really just creating a generics company. And the reason why there isn't any generic insulin is because each new insulin is "next generation" and people would rather pay more for the added benefit than use the old stuff.
ZLeviathan 11y ago
up up up~~

190 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

snewk 11y ago

Member of the project here; Since we have already met our target $ for phase I, we opened up a stretch goal to fund phase II. We are in the early stages of establishing the protocols for cutting and folding the proinsulin into its final, active form, and are looking into purification methods sufficient for research and potential pharmaceutical use. Meeting stretch goals will help us purchase the reagents and equipment necessary to execute these protocols.

jacquesm 11y ago
I have a really hard time taking this project serious. Plenty of people in my surroundings have diabetes so I can see the impact would be huge. If you asked for a few million then I would find it a lot more believable than the amounts that are requested in the crowdfunding campaigns. If someone asked for $25000 to build the next electric car I'd not believe them either, there is more to making the next electric car in terms of process and design than being able to buy a battery and some motors.
- snewk 11y ago
  Check out my replies in the other thread.
- codingdave 11y ago
  You seem to be confusing the effort to make a prototype with the effort of scaling to production. Prototyping has smaller costs.

jacquesm 11y ago

That's on first glance a really nice project and goal but $12K to create a generic insulin is not going to cut it. That will barely get you a kitchen, not a laboratory that will produce something that will pass FDA approval after you spend a very large multiple of that on tests.

snewk 11y ago
There are already multiple lab spaces online with many active members participating in this project. As far as FDA trials go, it is something currently outside the scope of this campaign. This is from the crowdfunding page: " $6,000 is needed to initiate Phase I of the project. In Phase I, the team will insert an optimized DNA sequence for insulin into E. coli bacteria, induce the bacteria to express insulin precursors, and verify that human proinsulin has been produced. If we raise more than the minimum required for Phase I, we will proceed to establish the protocols for cutting and folding the proinsulin into its final, active insulin form, and develop purification methods sufficient for research and potential pharmaceutical use. 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. "
- jacquesm 11y ago
  That still seems incredibly cheap to me. On another note, I'd be happy to back your campaign (I'd see it as contributing to your education rather than that I would expect you to succeed but that's just my totally un-informed opinion), but the requirement for becoming a backer are apparently that one signs up or uses facebook and that's a bridge I will not cross for any good cause. Is there some other way I can contribute?
  - snewk 11y ago
    It is indeed a low number as far as science research goes. It's pretty staggering how inexpensive experimenting with DNA can be. Recent advances in DNA synthesis are outpacing Moore's Law. Creating genetic constructs for insulin is also cheaper because insulin itself is a relatively simple protein. And fortunately there are also a ton of extremely qualified people on the team who seem to love working for free. EDIT: you shouldnt need to use facebook. you can sign up for experiment .com with just an email addy.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      I don't want to sign up for anything, I want to back your campaign. If your project has a direct way of receiving some funds let me know, email address in my profile.

ZLeviathan 11y ago

guys, please tweet or share this news to your friends.

eveningcoffee 11y ago

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. Well, the report itself says: prescription medications to treat complications of diabetes (18%) So this is up to $31.68 billion in 2012. I will assume for simplification that all of it goes for insulin. There are about 20 million patients in US (according to http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/ http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/). So this puts us into $100-150 in a month range for the insulin.

cperciva 11y ago
I'm not sure which report you're looking at, but "prescription medications to treat complications of diabetes" means things like painkillers for neuropathy, antibiotics for infections, et cetera. Insulin falls under "antidiabetic agents", which treat diabetes itself, not the complications. But most of the 20 million diabetics in the US are type 2 and do not require insulin; it's only Type 1s and the most severe cases Type 2s who take insulin.
- mikeyouse 11y ago
  The CDC keeps pretty good stats, as of 2011, there were about 6 million diabetics taking insulin; http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/meduse/fig1.htm http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/meduse/fig1.htm
RHSeeger 11y ago
Just throwing in my experience/numbers, for those interested. I'm a type 1 diabetic (for ~30 years) and take Apidra (short acting) and Lantus (long acting) daily. I use about 5 vials of each per 3 months. I "think" the cost of each vial, if I was paying sticker price, would be about $250.00. So... 2 * 5 * 250 / 3 = $833 / month As it turns out, there's several mitigating factors: 1. I have insurance, so I pay much less than that 2. For those without insurance, the insulin creator has programs to help such people pay for the insurance (discounts for some, max out-of-pocket for others)

ZLeviathan 11y ago

truly remarkable only if it's real...

kevindeasis 11y ago

https://experiment.com/projects/open-insulin https://experiment.com/projects/open-insulin

fabian2k 11y ago

My impression is that the production of biological drugs (as opposed to small molecules) is simply more expensive on a large scale. There isn't as much potential to save costs as with small molecule generic drugs. This seems to be a small-scale expression and optimization, and I'd guess that this is not the expensive part of developing a generic insulin. Large-scale manufacturing and making sure you're producing the correct molecule reliable, and then demonstrating that to the FDA are probably orders of magnitude more expensive.

kgwgk 11y ago

> Since there are no generic versions available in the United States, insulin is very expensive I don't know if that might qualify as very expensive but one can get one month worth of insulin for $50. http://theperfectd.com/2014/10/23/type1-diabetes-no-insurance-how-little-can-you-pay/ http://theperfectd.com/2014/10/23/type1-diabetes-no-insuranc...

cant_kant 11y ago

"Kevin Riggs, an instructor in medicine at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored an article about generic insulin earlier this year, doesn't think that Open Insulin 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).” "

mdup 11y ago

I remember reading in another HN thread about insulins (too lazy to search it right now) that plenty of prototype insulins have been developed, but most of them could cause nasty diseases, notably cancer. Hence only a low number of well-tested commercial insulins have been pushed to the market. Does someone knowledgeable have more info about those "good" vs. "bad" insulins?

snewk 11y ago
biologically produced insulin starts as a monomeric protein (meaning it only consists of one string of amino acids) called preproinsulin. this amino acid chain must interact with itself to form stabilizing interactions and disulfide bonds. once these disulfide linkages are created, this insulin precursor undergoes a multi step enzymatic cleavage which cuts off some bits and makes biologically active insulin. There are many ways to create insulin synthetically, and some of them lead to product contaminated with misfolded proteins. Misfolded proteins may have no effect, but sometimes they can activate the IGF-1 signal pathway which has been associated with cancer. There is also a chance of an autoimmmune reaction to the misfolded insulin, which would also be very bad. We are exploring a few different methods for our insulin production specifically with this concern in mind.
- ff7c11 11y ago
  Misfolded proteins also cause Alzheimer's disease. They are the number one reason why cannibalism is bad. If you eat a human brain with misfolded human proteins (prions) it can cause your proteins to misfold. I think.
  - snewk 11y ago
    Yes, misfolded prion proteins(PrPsc) can 'infect' other correctly folded prion proteins(PrPc). Prions are glycoproteins found on the surface of cells, and they affect cell signaling from the exterior of a cell to the interior. Insulin, on the other hand, is a free floating small molecule not anchored to a cell. Misfolded insulin is not 'infectious' like PrPsc. The biological role of prions is still not well known, but one reason prion diseases are such a big deal is that prions are resistant to normal biological protein degredation. They are hard buggers to get rid of. Unlike insulin, which has a specific protease enzyme which breaks it down.

cant_kant 11y ago

Here is an price from an Indian site "Actrapid Insulin, Neutral 40IU x 1mL 10ml Actrapid VIAL 145.00 " http://www.drugsupdate.com/brand/showavailablebrands/830/1 http://www.drugsupdate.com/brand/showavailablebrands/830/1 That is $2.19 according to xe.com and is a branded version made by Novo Nordisk. So if you use 40 units a day, it would be less than $7 a month. Greater regulation, higher wages and higher occupational health and safety standards keep the price higher in the US.

dnautics 11y ago
it's not regulation, occupational health, and safety standards that keep the price higher. Drugs sold in india have just about as good standards as in the US. If it's made by Novo Nordisk, it probably comes out of the same plant that supplies the US supply. Even Indian generics manufacturers get themselves certified by the FDA because they want the lucrative US market.
- melling 11y ago
  Now if we could only convince India to move upmarket and develop new drugs instead of simply making generics. India would be richer and their population of 1.3 billion people would greatly benefit, as would little countries like the United States.

ff7c11 11y ago

Not going to happen. "Biohacking" is 100% hype. 0% science. On insulin specifically: http://blog.indysci.org/insulin-is-hard-but-not-impossible/ http://blog.indysci.org/insulin-is-hard-but-not-impossible/

erkkie 11y ago
Biohacking is 100% gonna happen, probably sooner than later. Trying to pretend otherwise is ignoring all the technologies becoming available on a ramen budget.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  And also ignoring all the commercial pharmaceuticals whose prices are being jacked up by orders of magnitude with no warning. Martin Skreli can make the mainstream news by jacking up the price of anti-infection drug pyrimethamine by 5555%. Cycloserine can go up 2160%. Isoproterenol, nitroprusside, tetracycline, and doxycycline went up abruptly. When your quality of life, or even the remaining duration of it, is largely in the hands of a few executives at a single company, it's generally a good move to do whatever is necessary to reduce your dependence on them, before they realize that they can bleed you dry--along with those like you--with a few keystrokes in their inventory system. It is inevitable that people made desperate by medical circumstance will do dangerous things with biology on a shockingly low budget. For instance, did you know that some people are doing at-home fecal transplants using thrift-store blenders and over-the-counter enema kits? How long do you think it will be before someone tries converting cells in their intestinal lining into beta cells, or implanting an artificial pancreas made from their own cells? It is very likely that any successes will be unknown, while the first person to inadvertently kill himself while attempting to cure his own diseases with garage-scale biotech will be criticized and demonized worldwide. And that will be the spark falling on dry tinder, as people realize that the cost of biohacking is now low enough to be within reach of ordinary people.
cinquemb 11y ago
As someone who works in neuro lab who occasionally reads about "Neurohacking" I could easily dismiss it as 100% hype, but I won't (although I do call out when someone talks to me about any of the devices on the market having seen manufactures come through our lab and try to peddle their… stuff). "A lot of biohackers (even PhD level biohackers ensconced in academia) are basically script kiddies – cut and paste these bits of DNA and cross your fingers and hope the result you expect pops out." Same is true of Neuro phds: "scan brains in fmri/eeg that i have no idea how it works from a physics perspective", run this matlab script here, use this proprietary software there, calculate "connectivity|power|correlation" - "does this look good for my paper? yes, shiny grant coming right up! Will it move the field forward? Not anymore than the thousand other papers out there but the university pr office is on it!" (in no particular order). I say this because if all this was more out in the open (methods, software, caveats on every level on a git repo) and more available to people in other fields/expertise to look at and source materials and parts, a lot could be moved forward in general from what I'm observing going on in academia now along the lines of: "As I worked on insulin in grad school, I risked my job as a lowly postdoc, chiming in and pointedly telling him (in front of the program manager) why it wouldn’t work. Some of my coworkers speculated that I might not show up the next day, but I survived to tell the tale." I see some well intentioned people fumbling around, being derided in private by academics (who play the same human status games in different ways) who are still willing to talk with such people (because $$$, and maybe because some other academic they "collaborate" with is talking with them), who are pretty smart in their field (who are finding alternative funding sources!) who I secretly hope burn a fire under the ass of what goes now, so I won't write it all off.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

unknown_apostle 11y ago

I don't understand this. So just one question: if it's that simple, why hasn't the market done it yet?

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Because there's no(t enough) profit in it? Markets don't always create the stuff we need, even if they're not full of safety regulations because stuff that's being made is dangerous.

replicatorblog 11y ago

I worked in diabetes for a decade so thought I'd chime in. This is an admirable project with very low prospects of making a difference in the lives of people with diabetes. I don't doubt this group will be able to show "success" in the form of simple clinical results. I have the highest doubts that they'd have the resources to do the broad-based clinical trials required to go to market. Look up "Eroom's Law" which is "Moore's Law" spelled backwards: http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1.html http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1.... Basically, the increases in pharma regulation means it takes longer and gets more expensive to create a new drug each year. This is a cool science project, but the reporting around it is sensational and not helpful to the millions of people with diabetes who have their cranks yanked regularly about miracle cures, cost-saving fantasies, etc. To address some raised in sub-threads: + You can get extraordinarily cheap drugs in India, the rest of the developing world, and in parts of Europe. The "greedy" drug companies adjust pricing to what local markets can bear. So instead of letting poor people die en masse they mark the drugs down and pass the cost onto the developed world. Fair trade IMO. + The reason there are so few generic insulins is that they are hard to make consistently enough to please the FDA and European regulators. Companies like Teva and Perrigo are multi-billion dollar manufacturers of generic drugs who would love to get get into this game, but as noted, biosimilar drugs, especially ones as powerful as insulins, are a lot harder to copy than aspirin.

EmlynC 11y ago
This is a really solid response. I'm a Pharmacologist and I've worked in a number of Biotechs. I have been part of pricing discussions to value our drugs and your assessment is correct — price discrimination, as in most industries, is based on what a particular market can bear. Factors that influence this are the way that healthcare systems are run (i.e. public healthcare, insurance based), the cost of compliance and competition. I wouldn't say that the industry subsidises poor countries via sales in the developed world, it's more a case of it's better to be paid something rather than be paid nothing. I personally, however, do like the happy side-effect this has for patients in poor countries. Increased regulation costs more to comply with and that cost of course is born by the consumer. The cost of regulatory compliance also varies on the market you sell to, the US being one of the most expensive. Just as with software or hardware, the price reflects the cost of production and maintaining the product. Notably with biologics (Insulin, any hormone ...) as opposed to small chemical entity (paracetamol, aspirin etc) is that broadly they are harder to keep in their stable active form. The are heat sensitive, chemically sensitive and have a tendency to stick to themselves. This tends to increase the cost of storage, logistics and compliance. It also means that if you can make a worthwhile biologic it will generally experience less competition.

mentos 11y ago

> “Every year it gets so much easier and cheaper to do genetic engineering.” Is there a hand on the doomsday clock for biological engineering?

protonpopsicle 11y ago

I have type 1. In an emergency situation, when demand outweighs supply for life-saving drugs, I would think it useful that there be recipes available online for ambitious DIYers. I think about this from time-to-time since since reading Alas, Babylon in which the diabetic characters are the first to die (maybe I'm too paranoid).

refurb 11y ago
If the situation is an emergency, would you really have time to make a drug yourself? Even the simplest drug takes a long time to make.

refurb 11y ago

I'll have to admit it's a pretty cool project, but if you want to create a cheap source of insulin, you're really just creating a generics company. And the reason why there isn't any generic insulin is because each new insulin is "next generation" and people would rather pay more for the added benefit than use the old stuff.

ZLeviathan 11y ago

up up up~~