Open Insulin - changing the paradigm

 The older sibling of Project GRFT is Open Insulin. They recently made a quality introductory video about their work which may be viewed here    We share the goals of  medicine for people, not profit, and valuing open source technology.   

New Open Insulin video

International biohacker project Open Insulin is hard at work.  At Counter Culture Labs, after early experiments with expression in E. Coli Bacteria, the emphasis has shifted to the yeast Pichia Pastoris. Here's a new video by Noel Carrascal PhD, who is working with us on computational design and simulation of the insulin protein.  

Summer in the lab updated 07 July 2017

We are starting our synthetic gene expression experiment soon.  This will be to see if we can express a peptide in bacteria that has shown properties as an entry inhibitor antiviral.  It has been a long time getting to this stage of actually doing the wetwork.   Monday we prepared 14 amp agar plates.  

The open insulin project is also going on this summer and we are looking at expression in Pichia (yeast) after a few initial experiments with E-Coli.  This is an international project with multiple biohacker labs so if your  biohacker lab is interested in participating and developing methods for making better and cheaper insulin please get in touch with us. 
Check out the project: http://openinsulin.org/ , and here , and then leave a message here if you would like to join us (or have a bake sale for us to raise more money, as we are all volunteers but materials cost $).  

Update: 7 July 2017  
Here at Nenufar molecules for life we are waiting for the fedex delivery today of our gene of interest (VRBNCR-01) in the  pET 15b plasmid.  Last night we made 100mL of SOC, again, as our first batch appeared to be contaminated.  Tonight we'll start more media prep as the LB amp agar plates we poured are too old and the ampicillin is likely losing potency.  
Open insulin is working on size exclusion chromatography of the pichia pastoris expressing pro insulin (both inducible and constitutive expression constructs are being researched)  

Biohackers take on the insulin shortage

Podcast with Anthony Di Franco 

here



Interested?  Consider joining us online or at Counter Culture Labs in Oakland, CA USA

Open source insulin project - come see us tonight.

The open source insulin project, ongoing at SF Bay Area biohacker spaces Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious Labs will have team members at California Academy of Sciences Nightlife 6 pm tonight 9-8-16.  I hope to meet some of you there...ask around for Eddy.