Greetings! Here is a quick overview of the most common information people tend to look for when first learning about the Open Insulin project.
Goals
We’re making a complete open source system for making insulin at a small scale. This includes organisms to make at least one long acting and one rapid acting insulin, and a bioreactor and purification system, and a protocol for production, purification, and QA that assures a medical-grade product, suitable to treat diabetes at least as safely and effectively as any alternative.
We’re also working on a business structure for a network of small production facilities that will be under direct control of the users of insulin, likely in a cooperative structure, and which may include partnerships with local hospitals and pharmacies.
Status
We’re in the final stages of making insulin glargine at lab scale, and have begun to look at making insulin aspart. We’ve also begun work on designing open hardware for protein production and purification, mainly on a UV detector for a chromatography system so far.
Helping Out & Learning More
*** We are running an internship program *** more information here.
We’re always looking for new volunteers and collaborators. We’re currently recruiting coordinators for legal work and social media, and would also like to establish relationships with institutional collaborators who can provide services we need or who are interested in partnering in the early stages of our plans with an eye on joining or dealing with the production network in the future.
People new to the project should join one of our new member orientation meetings, which occur on the last Sunday of each month at 10:30 AM Pacific. The next one will be on May 31st. Details on joining are here.
Other than that, the best way to get in touch is to join one of our regular meetings, held each Wednesday at 6 PM Pacific time and each Sunday at noon Pacific time. You can join by video at meet.jit.si/OpenInsulin. (But check back here frequently, because we are evaluating other video conferencing options because of performance issues jitsi can have in poor network conditions due to its purely decentralized architecture.)
You can also email us at openinsulin@gmail.com and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
If you want to make a financial contribution, you can donate here, or contact us at the above email for larger amounts. Be advised; recent attention from the press has resulted in a large volume of email so there may be some delay before you receive a reply.