– How does Insulin not have generic versions compared to something like Tylenol?
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It does. The type that people reference when they say “insulin only costs $8 per vial to produce” is dogshit compared to the newer, more expensive variants.
The open source insulin project is getting close to start human testing.
They are going to need a lot of funding to fend off all the lawsuits that are going to be fired at them by the other Pharma companies.
There are several generic versions of insulin and they are actually pretty cheap. You will read people on Reddit getting very excited about overpriced insulin but the truth is the basic stuff is affordable. But some people do better with more expensive and still patented insulin.
Blackrock and Vanguard, two major stock holders of Eli Lilly (Insulin producer US) are also major stock holders of Pepsi and Coca Cola. It seems like their business model is to create a problem by selling you lots of cheap sugars with expensive marketing campaigns. And then offer the solution (insulin) against a huge mark-up because they always find a way to keep their patents fresh (evergreening patents) by adding minor ‘improvements’.
This is a bit more of a complicated answer, but you should really read this law review note published a few years ago by the University of Georgia School of Law. Everyone trying to answer this question should read it:
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/jipl/vol27/iss2/4/
It’s because the US government has over-regulated the industry to a level where only corporations with billions of dollars to spend can get their products put to market.
There are. There are different types of insulin that have some extra benefits for convince, like some versions last longer between doses and some have fancy auto injectors.
You can walk in to a Walmart and buy a generic version of insulin for a few dollars per vial. It’s a very old, proven formulation that doesn’t have a fancy injector or super long efficacy time, but it’s very effective and very inexpensive. Unfortunately, people prefer fancy auto injectors and don’t want to dose as frequently, so most people don’t take advantage of it even though a cheap generic exists.
The expensive part is the manufacturing of the product.
So imagine a generic Ferrari … it’s still going to be pretty expensive.
the patent can still be in place if the manufacturer makes a tiny little change to the composition which allows them a full monopoly on the product.
EDIT: This is based on US drug patent law (21 usc 355, 35 usc 271, general patent information 35 usc)
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