yellow and clear glass bottle — Photo by Dennis Klicker on Unsplash

The Open Insulin project is lead by a team of biohackers and open-source hardware makers who are trying to change a multi-billion dollar business by engineering microorganisms (bacteria and yeast) that are capable of producing insulin and all the related machinery to make all that possible.

Before talking about the details of the project and why what they do is important for many people, let’s have brief look into the history about insulin:

The first injection of insulin was given to a 14-year-old diabetic patient a 100 years ago at the Toronto General Hospital in Canada. A century has passed since then and one could think that access to this vital hormone would be affordable universally. Well, not really, specially in the US and other countries… Let’s dive into why.

The original process to obtain insulin was based on extracting it and filtering it from cows and pigs pancreases. This process was granted a patent which was sold for $1 to the Toronto University with the aim that it anyone would be free to prepare the extract, but no one could secure a monopoly on it.

In 1978, scientists from Genentech figured how to create insulin in a lab without the need for pigs or cows. Recombinant DNA was the new technique used to make yeast produce insulin in a lab environment. This discovery makes possible to have virtually unlimited insulin with cost-effective ingredients. 4 years later the first r-DNA insulin was produced commercially by Eli Lilly. This new process granted patents to the laboratories.

Over the years, the pharmaceutical companies have been extending their different patents related with insulin production. Some of these companies are accused of evergreening their patents, that is, extending the grant of the patent by applying some minor changes to it but without providing any significant improvement on the hormone.

Sanofi, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk account for 96% of the world’s insulin supply and they all have been using patents to keep competitors out of the market. With few competitors in the market there is no incentive in keeping the prices low. The laboratories have been marketing in favor of the insulin based on r-DNA over the animal based one. Since 2006, all the commercially available insulin is based on r-DNA.

However, patents are not the only restriction that competition will encounter, but the FDA too. A competitor would have to undergo for a biosimilar approval process, which can be very costly (up to $250 million) and take huge time to be completed.

This project pretends to find the microorganisms, the protocols and the laboratory equipment needed for producing insulin at a small scale. This could change the current trend of centralized production by big pharma and allowing small laboratories at a city or state level to produce the insulin. The ultimate goal of the foundation is to be able to produce fast-acting (lispro) and long-acting insulin (glargine).

Vadim Kimlaychuk is an IT infrastucture manager who is volunteering in the project and he is working on the design of a key equipment for manufacturing insulin: the Fast Protein Liquid Chromatography machine (FPLC). This piece of hardware is needed to purify proteins. Vadim is working in creating a FPLC based on open source designs. One of the difficult tasks that they are facing is finding and obtaining the right components to build the hardware as they are often not specifically design for the purpose they intend, so they have to adapt them.

The Open Insulin project has a long road ahead before they will be able to release insulin usable by diabetics. Even though there are some major issues to overcome they continue ahead.

It’s encouraging and sad at the same time that projects like this exist. It’s nice to see that there are people who are willing to volunteer and try to find out a solution that relies on the same principles of the open-source software, from which a lot of people can benefit as everyone will be able to access the resources to replicate an insulin laboratory and can also contribute back with any improvements that can be applied to original process or design. However, it is also sad that this project is searching for a solution that already exists, but due to the exploitation of the patent system (and unlimited pricing in the US drug market) many people in the US and around the world don’t have proper access to the insulin they need.

Sources: United Nations News, The Hill, WiredPen, The Verge

This week’s highlights in tech & cybersecurity

Albania cuts Iran ties over cyber attacks: Albania has ordered Iranian diplomats to leave the country. These measures come after the US concluded that Iran was behind July 15th cyber attacks to government infrastructure. On September 10th, Albania reported a second cyber attack on its border systems.
iPhone 14 will have satellite connectivity (only one-way communication for SOS): Globalstar is going to be the provider for the emergency communication.
Go programming language has added a tool in its tool-chain to detect known vulnerabilities in your projects.
Ships manipulate their location data to avoid international laws: United Nations discovered that more than 500 ships tampered with their Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) to hide their real locations. The use of this fraudulent technique has been used to cover tankers stopping at Iran, Chinese fishing boats operating in protected waters in South America and container ships that hide journeys in the Middle East. International laws require that all big ships equip satellite transponders, known as AIS (Automated Identification Systems). AIS location manipulation shows how easy it is to tamper with these systems

❤️ My favorite things

I just finished reading The Elephant in the Brain: This book goes into detail into our hidden motives for what we do as social and political creatures that we are. It’s interesting in how in takes another perspective in religion, politics, charity, art, among others. I must recognise that it was a bit hard to finish for me and I felt that some explanations were oversimplified, but overall I would recommend it.

The Side Channel

Open Insulin: biohacking and Open-sourcing…