Competition in insulin will be good. Here is a cheaper manufacturing process, which suggests, but does not guarantee, lower prices. Will investors in rBIO seek profit maximization by price-gouging, counter to the company’s stated mission, or by driving prices down to grab market share? And what about when others come into the market? Well, we’ll see.
My thanks to arhpdx for putting this story into a Good News Roundup.
Wired: A Startup Has Unlocked a Way to Make Cheap Insulin
It looks like the expiration of the patents used by Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi, who have greedily jacked up the US prices of insulin and other diabetes treatments to ridiculous levels, is finally allowing some innovation in the production of biosimilar insulin that will ultimately save patients thousands of dollars. The illustration above shows several variations on insulin’s amino acid chains that turn out to have nearly identical biological functions.
One biotech startup, rBIO of Houston, is aiming to make insulin more affordable by producing a copycat version of the drug—known as a biosimilar. It’s not the only company developing biosimilar insulin, but it says it has invented a new process to do so using custom-made bacteria.
CEO Cameron Owen says his company has created novel strains of bacteria that can produce insulin at twice the yield than is currently possible. Thursday, rBIO announced it had completed lab tests of its biosimilar insulin to determine that it is structurally and functionally similar to a brand-name one. It plans to begin a clinical trial later this year to determine whether its insulin works as well as a product already on the market. “The high price of insulin is nothing short of price gouging,” Owen says. A 2020 estimate by the RAND Corporation put the average list price of a vial of insulin at $98 in the US compared with $12 in Canada and $7.52 in the UK. Three manufacturers have long dominated the US insulin market—Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi.