OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

The non-profit Open Insulin Foundation began in 2015 in Oakland, California with $16,000 in crowdfunding. Over the past six years, the lab has grown with the goal of providing diabetics with life-saving insulin at an affordable cost.

Type 1 diabetic Anthony Di Franco is the founder of Open Insulin. His goal is to make insulin production open-source and decentralized. Di Franco was inspired to found the organization after experiencing a temporary lapse in insurance coverage in which he had to pay $2400 per month for insulin supplies. At the time, that dwarfed the $1600 per month he received as a graduate school stipend.

Open Insulin hopes to design a "recipe" that other small labs all over the country can follow to produce insulin for diabetics living in the area. Once the recipe is perfected, the team will purify the protein and test it on Di Franco, who has agreed to become the project's guinea pig. (There are no FDA regulations against testing drugs that you produce yourself.) As Di Franco says of the project, "It's not like a new drug where you don't really know what it does. This is a drug that we already know what it does, and we just have to see if we made it correctly."

If Di Franco's test run is a success, he will release the recipe online and hope that hospitals and clinics take advantage of it to produce low-cost insulin for their patients.

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