Why is insulin dominated by a few companies globally and if bacteria are used to produce human insulin, why can no other company replicate this?
In: Biology
Agree with most of what else has already been said.
To add… at this point Insulin is a commodity product (a basic product where there is little or no differentiation between manufacturers). Examples of other commodities in the medicine world would be Acetaminophen, Ibuprofen, Aspirin, etc. where there’s no meaningful differences between manufacturers.
As a result, there are very low profit margins on the sale of the product. What happens after it leaves the manufacturer is more complicated. As tends to happen with other commodity manufacturers (steel mills, paper mills, oil refineries, wood mills) there tend to be very few, but rather large facilities that produce the product but run 24/7 for the sake of being as efficient as possible in order to maximize what little profit they can make.
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