The Drs made no money on it but won the Nobel prize Before 1921 type 1 diabetes had no treatment .
I would not put it quite like that. More like, some Wall Street types offered the Drs dump trucks full of money if they would only sell a patent on insulin, but they refused and made sure nobody would make a profit by exploiting suffering diabetics.
Until now that is.
Insulin is not Rx except for Indiana. Anyone can buy it . If you have insurance to get the modern insulins paid for you need a Rx. WalMart sells insulin cheap but it’s the older style that does not work as well. But people still use that if they don’t have insurance.
I’m alive because of the modern insulin.
I cannot use the old style.
My insulin pump died today. So I’m doing shots for a day or two.
Man I love that pump.
You can get it from Canada and Mexico too.
But understandably there is pushback from those countries with people saying ‘fix your own health care system rather than using up all our medicines, we need that medicine for our own citizens’. And they’re right.
FWIW, these newer generation insulins were far cheaper 20 years ago. Which is odd, because biotechnology tends to make prices go down, not up. A $400 vial of insulin now may have only been $80 about 2 decades ago.
I’m not sure why the prices skyrocketed so much, but I know there won’t be a political solution anytime soon. At best on teh state level all we’re getting is laws that say ‘your copay can’t be more than $100 for insulin’, but those laws still basically allow the insulin maker to charge your insurance company anything they want, which increases prices for everyone.
all modern insulins are made in a lab at least in the US. They change DNA in bacteria and then the bacteria makes insulin. It was the first drug made that way but now others are also made with that process.
Because companies found they could increase the price and so increase their profits.
Humulin has been made this way since the early 1980s. Before that, insulin was made from cow or pig pancreases (and some countries, Japan in particular, used fish).
The first time I rang up insulin, I was a 16-year-old Target cashier in 1980, years away from deciding I wanted to be a pharmacist, but I did know what it was. I called the pharmacy because I couldn’t believe that anything that important could possibly cost $6.28. It sure doesn’t now.
With the actual insulin and all the paraphernalia my cost is now up to $6 bills/ per month.
My insurance covers alot of it. I wonder how folks manage who are not privately insured or on Medicaid/Medicare.
The original patent for Lantus, a widely-used insulin, was set to expire in 2015. From the article I’m going to link to: “On pricing, I-MAK found that from 2012 to 2016, Lantus had the highest annual price increases for Medicaid, at more than 18% per year, and the second highest for Medicare among the drugs it has reviewed.”
I don’t know if the article explains how they were able to extend it’s patent but it seems clear that they increased the price because… nothing prevented them from doing so.
-Long-time Lantus user
In Aus, generic bio-equivalent insulin became available last year. Rather than dropping their price to compete, Lantus was withdrawn and re-approved under a different name. Thus enabling them to keep the American-approved ‘Lantus’ only available at the American price. The company has the exact same drug from the exact same company at a lower price in Australia under the new name.
Lantus isn’t just keeping out generic equivilants. It’s a 20-year-old drug: there are next-generation insulins available in Aus. The Lantus patents are also keeping those insulins out of the USA.
I have to inject 300 units of two different kinds of insulin each day. If my insurance didn’t cover it I couldn’t afford it. I’d be a dead man.
Do you use u-500?
inhaled insulin is available but not used a lot. An early version inhaled bombed since it was very hard to use.
also working on beta cell transplants but that is a way off