Mass producing insulin from Safflower?
When insulin was discovered in 1921 and a method developed to produce it in sufficiently large quantities, it revolutionized medicine. Instead of being a deadly disease, diabetes turned into something that was treatable and allowed one to go about living a largely normal life. One of the most notable things about the development of mass-produced insulin was that the two men, Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best didn't patent their method, and instead made it freely available it to the rest of the world*. This is one of the most notable times in the history of modern science when a truly significant breakthrough wasn't monetized. (The timeline for insulin is good, short reading if you're interested — it's rare to see unselfish altruism when there's huge dollars at stake.)
Of course they won the Nobel Prize for their efforts, and made medical history. But despite advances in purity, and decreased allergic reactions to non-self insulin, it remains quite expensive. Prohibitively so for those outside the first-world. Perhaps in a strange twist of irony, diabetes is more prevalent here in the first world than it is elsewhere largely because of the lifestyle many choose to live. (Huge quantities of synthetic sugars, etc.) Nonetheless, it is a killer elsewhere as well.
Now, it seems, there's a new way to make insulin. Instead of injecting bits of DNA into E. coli, to cause them to produce human insulin, it can now be synthesized using the Safflower plant.
SemBioSys says it can make more than one kilogram of human insulin per acre of safflower production.
That amount could treat 2,500 diabetic patients for one year and, in turn, meet the world's total projected insulin demand in 2010 with less than 16,000 acres of safflower production.
[...]
SemBioSys believes its product would require about $80-million in capital investment to make 1,000 kg of insulin, compared with $250-million per 1,000 kg for traditional insulin.
With diabetes being a $130 billion industry here in the US alone, being able to mass-produce cheap(er) insulin will likely save consumers and their insurers billions. The question is how much of that savings will be passed on to consumers and insurers when the process is snapped up by a major pharmaceutical company? I'm sure Eli Lilly is very interested in this new development; they've historically had the biggest slice of the insulin pie — will they charge just a tiny bit less than their counterparts, or will they pass the significant savings on to everyone else too?
* Actually they sold it to the University of Toronto for $1
[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, diabetes, insulin, history[/tags]
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