76 Time November 4, 2019
in a hip Oakland, Calif., neighbOrhOOd,
just blocks from cocktail bars and swanky Mex-
ican restaurants, is an enormous warehouse,
home to Counter Culture Labs, ground zero for
an audacious challenge to the high cost of pre-
scription drugs. In the entryway stands a 1½-
story cardboard T. R e x , and inside it’s a bit as if
Dr. Frankenstein shared his lab with a hoarder:
cluttered shelves hold piles of drying mush-
rooms, Clorox wipes, wires, kitchen pots, motor
oil, two books about Darwin, ropes, a broken
alarm clock, a telescoping magnifying glass, a
heat gun, a 3-D printer and several jars of clear
liquid with tubes running between them. One
shelf holds plastic bins labeled lab COaTs,
painT & brushes and ebOla suiTs.
A group of professional scientists and ama-
teur tinkerers founded Counter Culture Labs in
2013 with the goal of bringing biotechnology
to the masses. At any time, it hosts dozens of
projects; when I visit in July, there’s one whose
objective is to make “vegan cheese” using yeast.
The Open Insulin Project has bigger plans.
The group wants to reverse engineer how the
world’s largest pharmaceutical companies pro-
duce insulin and then turn over the instructions
to the public. In theory, anyone with a bit of
cash could then build a DIY lab in their garage
and make open-source insulin.
Currently three companies—Eli Lilly, Novo
Nordisk and Sanofi—control most of the world’s
$27 billion insulin market, using a complicated
web of regulations and patents to keep a hold on
it. Open Insulin wants to rebuild it with no mega-
corporations and no profit. The project is prob-
ably months, if not years, away from actually
making medical-grade insulin, but its objective
is as much political as it is production-oriented:
bringing a sharp focus to the stratospheric
price of insulin and, more broadly, the preda-
tory pricing of prescription drugs in the U.S.
Over the past 60 years, the list price of a vial
of insulin has gone from about 75¢ to $250—
an increase nearly 43 times the rate of the U.S.
Consumer Price Index inflation. “High drug
costs exist throughout the system, but insulin
is the poster child of this broken marketplace,”
says Representative Tom Reed (R., N.Y.), one of
the chairs of the Congressional Diabetes Cau-
cus. Some, in fact, think that the project is al-
ready working as a kind of provocation: a way
to force the issue on what is really a policy prob-
lem. “If the price of insulin gets regulated, the
project will just go away,” says Jean Peccoud, a
professor of chemical and biological engineer-
ing at Colorado State University.
For now, the project seems to be in a reg-
ulatory safe space, but that may change as it
gets closer to making actual medicine. In an
email, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
spokes person acknowledged that the agency is
aware of the Open Insulin Project, but noted,
“We cannot comment on hypothetical situa-
tions or potential future states of regulation.”
Predatory pricing in the U.S. isn’t unique
to insulin. A study of the world’s top 20 medi-
cations found that Americans pay an average
of three times as much as patients in the U.K.
do for a given drug. The science behind mak-
ing insulin is old, which makes it a good first
target for the disruption of the pharmaceuti-
cal industry.
Anthony Di Franco, one of the Open Insulin
Project’s co-founders, has diabetes himself, and
has watched as the price of managing his dis-
ease has gone up and up. He has a dual under-
graduate degree in physics and math/computer
science from Yale University and is currently
on leave from pursuing his Ph.D. in computerDi Franco, founder
of the Open Insulin
Project, works with
yeast at Counter
Culture Labs in
Oakland, Calif.