fullsquare
i mean i don't think about it as a separate budget line because if you don't have that you get police raids and investigation instead of normal business, but yea. insulin is purified using HPLC, so at all times you get some of analytical data about fractions you just made, so some of QC, not all, but already something, already happens at this point
my point is that actual manufacturing costs will be low because biotech scalability logic is that you need to make yeast or something that makes peptide you like and then all you need to do is keep bioreactor alive and happy. lots of what is left is in purification
also it's an injectable so it's gonna be kept to some standards that non-injected drugs aren't. whoever comes up with insulin pill will be printing money
there are multiple short-acting and long-acting insulins because you can't patent other people's things, but now it's all off-patent. just take your stainless steel bioreactor and preparative HPLC, cook up a batch, wait ten years for biosimilar approval and you're good to go
because unlike with small molecule drugs, when cooking up generic biopharmaceutical there’s extra approval process that amounts to a tiny clinical trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosimilar this and type of economics of scale that there is with biologicals makes manufacture at large scale way more preferable. these requirements were loosened a bit over time
I know not every state can or are willing to do this
this kind of thing scales well, i see no reason why after california has it set up, other states couldn't get insulin from them, or chip in
it might just be in glass vial and freezing broke it
the problem is that there is natural (as in, unmodified) cheap generic insulin available, it's just that it sucks compared to everything else. you see, insulin is a peptide that is supposed to appear, do some signalling, then disappear and unmodified insulin copies this thing exactly. the problem is, most of the time when peptide is supposed to work as a pharmaceutical, you don't want to do that, you'd like insulin to last longer than usual, which means changes to it that make breakdown slower, or adding something that makes it stick to albumin, which has similar effect because it hides insulin somewhere enzymes can't reach it and also it makes it start acting slower. this means less frequent dosing and less changes in insulin activity over time. there are also other insulins that start acting faster than natural, and this is also due to a couple of modifications in its structure
for another example, ozempic was not the first drug in its class, it's also a modified peptide, and it can be injected s.c. once a week, compared to previous iteration (liraglutide) that requires daily injections. if natural peptide is injected i.m. instead, its halflife is half an hour, and in serum it's only two minutes (it gets released a bit slower than it is metabolized)
manufacturing costs are about the same for any variant, most of it is in purification. patents for a couple of these have expired anyway by now, but if manufacturing is limited then price can be set arbitrarily high (see daraprim)
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
at least he didn't cause a civil war
more like task failed successfully
plenty of drone teams release geolocated videos day after they happen, but in this case i'll guess that real sauce is classified top secret, that thing is outdated info and everyone is five steps ahead
ahem
triple the defense budget
it's a bit like crude oil. lumber cut up to what standards? or maybe chipboard or veneer or paper or cellulose fiber (used in many things including artillery propellant, hot commodity lately)? or maybe some form of chemically modified cellulose or maybe something else? then do you have industrial capacity and logistics for that? what if customer from egypt won't accept fiberboard made to an argentinian standard, that you made for an argentinian customer that changed mind or the other way around? canada is a rich country, can you make it competitive? sometimes it works. i heard of a case of company that bought logs from finland, processed them in poland into fiberboard and sold them, at least once, to a customer in tanzania
couple of reddit threads suggest that this is something you can do, but you have to be evasive around american border guard later if you go in person