A billion a year in health care costs, $15 billion of which comes from insulin.

Biohackers With Diabetes Are Making Their Own Insulin

HEALTH CARE COSTS

Open Insulin Project, a biohacker collective

that is trying to produce the lifesaving drug and provide it to people with diabetes for free, or close to it. Open Insulin founder Anthony DiFranco thinks a potential solution to the insulin pricing crisis is to enable patients and hospitals to create the drug themselves.
Diabetes is a punishingly expensive disease. In an Oakland warehouse, scientists are going DIY. Diabetes has become the most expensive disease in the United States, reaching $327 billion a year in health care costs, $15 billion of which comes from insulin. In 1923, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto for $1 each because they believed such an essential medicine should be available to everyone who needed it. The original patents for the insulin molecule have long since expired, but patents on parts of the production process — a strategy that has been famously used (and arguably abused) by drug companies — remain because pharmaceutical companies keep tweaking how they make it.

A billion a year in health care costs, $15 billion of which comes from insulin.

In 1923, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto for $1 each because they believed such an essential medicine should be available to everyone who needed it. The original patents for the insulin molecule have long since expired, but patents on parts of the production process — a strategy that has been famously used (and arguably abused) by drug companies — remain because pharmaceutical companies keep tweaking how they make it.
There are currently several lawsuits accusing the three drug companies of price fixing.

One class action complaint claims Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk raised the list price of insulin in lockstep over the last 20 years, stating that the companies have been “unlawfully inflating the benchmark prices of rapid- and long-acting analog insulin drugs,” and placing them in violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
https://elemental.medium.com/biohackers-with-diabetes-are-making-their-own-insulin-edbfbea8386d