Growing Insulin 251
McLuhanesque writes "The Globe and Mail reports that a Calgary biotech firm has developed a process to turn genetically modified safflower oil into human insulin in commercial quantities. The process reduces capital costs by 70% and product cost by 40%. '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.'"
Re:Positively fantastic news (Score:2, Informative)
Not forgetting the most recent articles posted about the links to Alzheimers [upi.com]
kilograms and *acres*? (Score:1, Informative)
1 acre = 4046.85642 m^2
Re:Positively fantastic news (Score:3, Informative)
Re:could someone do back-of-envelope calculation (Score:5, Informative)
There are two main types of diabetes (with a couple of oddball variants that are rare, diabetes mellitus describes the final symptom of elevated bloodsugar, there are a few possible root causes of that symptom, which determine the type). Type I is known as insulin-dependent or juvenile diabetes (because it is rarely diagnosed past the age of 20). It is caused by the immune system attacking the beta cells of the pancreas. Eventually all beta cells die and the body can no longer produce any insulin, so it must be provided from an external source. Type I is generally considered to be the "severe" form of diabetes because of this fact. Prior to the discovery of insulin, average life expectancy after diagnosis was 1-2 years, and the disease killed younger children faster than teenagers. Oh, it was a rather slow, painful, and unpleasant death too. Essentially no matter how much you ate and drank, your body would slowly dehydrate and starve.
Type II is usually referred to simply as adult-onset diabetes, because until recently, it has been unheard of for young people to develop it. (A high prevalence of childhood obesity is changing this). In Type II diabetes, the body does produce insulin, but for various reasons it is not enough, whether it is due to reduced capacity or increased demands beyond normal capacity, or a combination of both. Most of the time, once diagnosed, Type II diabetes can be managed solely with oral medication which increases the body's sensitivity to the insulin it does produce, and in many cases controlled solely with diet and exercise. (Losing weight can often cause Type II diabetes to disappear.) It is extremely rare for Type II to require external insulin rejections. Interestingly enough, while Type II is less "severe", this very fact makes it far more dangerous because it frequently goes undiagnosed for long periods of time, and the elevated bloodsugars do damage to various parts of the body.
This is definately an interesting development, but how will this company deal with patented "designer" insulins such as Lantus (from Aventis Pharmaceutical, a special "peakless" insulin used to provide a long-acting baseline insulin dose), and Novolog/Humalog, two "extremely rapid acting" insulins that actually take effect FASTER than injecting normal human insulin. FYI, "human insulin" is insulin produced by genetically engineered bacteria that is identical to human insulin, it is NOT extracted from humans, unlike pork and beef insulins which were extracted from the pancreases of pigs and cows respectively. While I'm sure their technology will work with Lantus and Humalog/Novolog, I don't know how the companies that produce the above three will react to this. Most likely they'll license the technology from this new company (if it works) or vice versa... I hope so.
Mod parent up (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's great and all, but... (Score:2, Informative)
His monthly insulin bill is around 600 dollars a month (total medication is ~1500, insurance is another ~900). While I'm sure that he would also like to have his diabetes cured, I think he would care quite a bit if this went down in price like this sounds like it should.
Maybe you don't care, maybe your insurance covers the expense or you don't need that much. But for a few million people this will really benefit them and make thier lives much easier. Personally I'm pretty happy that some people out there can look to more than simply what affects them (or thier wants only) and not go for the Cure or nothing approach.
Re:You are wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That's great and all, but... (Score:3, Informative)
It would have been nice to know which country you are talking about. The USA seems to be the 'default' country on /. (because of # of US participants), but your comment doesn't make sense for the US; we have an all-volunteer military, so everyone is 'exempt' from serving in the military.
Colorblind people are allowed to serve in the US military. My brother-in-law joined the Marines, hoping for a useful skill such as electrician. They tested him and found out that he was red-green colorblind. The electrician MOS is closed to him, as are: pilot, explosive ordinance disposal ("cut the red wire"), and a few others. He went into Intel.
Re:That's great and all, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Retail: a bottle of insulin is $20. That lasts me approximately 14 days
In those 14 days I will use between 70 and 140 test strips, which cost about $.50 a piece. So lets say $50.
Also - in those 14 days I will use 5 sets of supplies for my insulin pump. At $17 a pop, that's $85
Out of that total $155, the insulin is only 13% of the cost. Granted the insurance company doesnt pay retail for anything, and I absorb a small fraction of the cost through deductibles, but it will still end up only being 13% of the cost of the daily supplies.
And let's not talk about the $5,000 insulin pump that only works for 4 years, or all the doctors visits, blood work, ER visits if I become sick......
A cure for Type 1 diabetes would save the insurance companies a fair amount of money in the mid-term, and extremely large amounts of money in the long term.
Re:That's great and all, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Diabetes is also several different diseases: Type 2 diabetics usually have insulin resistance, and Type 1 diabetics usually have a complete destruction of insulin producing cells by their own body's immune system (an auto-immune disease). Type 1 actually has some interesting hope for a cure, with Dr. Faustman's work at http://www.joinleenow.org/html/trials.php [joinleenow.org]. She managed to cure Type 1 in rats by turning off the immune response that destroys insulin producing cells, and the rats' own bodies naturally made new insulin producing cells from adult stem cells and cured their Type 1 diabetes.
Re:So start a non-profit (Score:3, Informative)
The medical field is rife with a lot of crackpots claiming their miracle cure is being repressed by the drug industry, especially for long-term medical problems like diabetes. While the drug industry is cut throat, almost all of these "vitamin cures" are expensive snake oil sold to wishful people who'd give a lot for a real cure, and don't have the expertise to read the actual original research and say "what a crock". The NONI JUICE, Mangosteen, chromium piccolinate, and Akai rice miracle cures are all examples of such nonsense, and we're going to keep hearing about them from hopeful people seeking miracles and from unethical vendors trying to make a buck.
Re:could someone do back-of-envelope calculation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's great and all, but... (Score:3, Informative)
The pharmacutical companies don't control all medical research. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) spent ~$28 BILLION last year funding medical research. That's your tax dollars at work. Most of the money went to University researchers or researchers at the NIH campus itself to do medical research for the public good.
Speaking as one of those researchers, we try to do the best reasearch possible, and then we publish our results in peer-reviewed journals, where anyone, anywhere on the planet who can get to a library, can get access to the results.
Every one of us would love to discover the cure to a disease. We'd instantly get much more visability in our field, and guaranteed funding for many more years of study.
So the 'big-nasty pharmacutical companies' aren't hiding the cure from every major disease from you. There are thousands of researchers working on these problems every day, with the experiments, protocols, and results published for everyone who cares to look, to see.
Re:That's great and all, but... (Score:3, Informative)
No, the big difficulty is with the mid-range or longer acting insulins. The old, animal-based, longer acting "Lente" insulins have been phased out in favor of the vastly more expensive but somewhat flatter-in-effect "Lantus" insulins. And because the new human NPH doesn't last as long as the old animal NPH, it's not really as suitable for the long-acting use as the new Lantus. Coupled with the hypoglycemic unawareness some people (such as my relative) have with human NPH before he switched to a pump, it's good reason to avoid it.
The duration of Lantus also has very little to do with it being human based, it's a modified insulin molecule and plays interesting games with its solubility and the pH of the fluid it's in to make it last 24 hours. The same techniques can certainly be applied to animal insulins. And people used to use Lente and Ultra-Lente with similar, far less expensive effects for what Lantus does now. Lente varied more in its effects from person to person, and Lantus is apparently much closer to 24 hours in its effects, so there is an advantage there. And Lantus is flatter in its overall effects, but this is not necessarily good, since it used to be possible to juggle the peaks of mid-range insulins like NPH or Lente to match mealtimes and reduce or eliminate the need for an additional shot of fast-acting insulin with the meals. But with the phase-out of Lente production, and the shorter duration of NPH and the trend towards hypoglycemic unawareness of all the human-based insulins, it's no longer as practical.
Overall, the benefits of the human insulins are perhaps a reduction in allergies (which still happen with human insulins!), and a big benefit to the pharmaceutical companies like Lilly and Novolin because their patents were expiring for refining the animal insulins, and those patents will give them another 20 years of a captive market.
Re:flamebaiter is Workin' Hard For You (Score:3, Informative)
But put the Fed money to work where it shows the most promise - and that most definitely is *not* embryonic stem cells. So stop using stem cells as a political football.
Bush is doing the right thing with his veto. Its questionable on the reasons he is putting forth, but good in the end results. Like a stopped clock, his hands this time are aligning with the right things. Let some time pass and I'm sure you can find somethign legitimate to beat him up over. But get your politics out of the funding questions.
You are aware that there is a difference between the federal government not funding stem cell research, and the government refusing to let its money be used for stem cell research. The big difference is infrastructure. Lets say I run a large medical research company in the US. If I buy a piece of equipment using any money from the federal government that equipment can never be used in anything related to new stem cell lines. If I hire someone to wash my floors using any federal money, then that person can't wash the floors in labs where research into new stem cell lines is being conducted. In the end if I want to do any research with new stem cell lines it ends up being a massive waste of resources as I have to duplicate a lot of my infrastructure for no good reason. You may think that wasting money that could be spent on research is a good thing, but I don't.