good. generic biosimilars cost like 1/5 of the on-patent thing price

fyi this fella has no training in chemistry or medicine and is just some random ass programmer with severe case of “saving the world from my homelab” symdrome

I don’t think it’s a thing because even the same insulin analogue from different manufacturer can have different dosing

90% of drug candidates fail in clinical trials

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

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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

you know maybe it’s a good thing that people can’t sleep on ceiling, everybody’s rent would double

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)

this is how 238Pu ceramic pellets for space probe generators look like, no fission required just alpha decay. If it was fission, it wouldn’t need to glow like this entire time because you can just turn it off

this shouldn’t be surprising if you paid any amount of attention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravda_network https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250310-russian-disinformation-infects-ai-chatbots-researchers-warn

i don’t mean beta-oxidation, it’s just a series of separated normal reactions. i mean something like this: when first learning about ketones, you might learn about aldol condensation, which has enol as a nucleophile and another carbonyl as electrophile. at some other point you might learn about strecker reaction, which has iminium ion as electrophile and cyanide as nucleophile. but really, what you can do is mix and match, and you can pair enolizable ketone and iminium (mannich reaction) or carbonyl and cyanide (cyanohydrin formation) and then generalize, for example you don’t need strictly ketone for mannich, you can use any electron rich conjugated system like malonate or nitroalkane anion (henry reaction) or phenol or indole. to figure this out you need to study mechanisms. these last two are usually treated as variants of friedel-crafts reaction, but really categories like this are fake

and to get that right, you need to know how these reactive intermediates look like, how reactive they are, what influences their stability which means that ochem starts with discussion of carbocations, carboanions, radicals, their shapes and orbitals involved, hyperconjugation, solvent effects and the like. and then first reactions taught are sn1/sn2, because these showcase these fundamentals nicely, and from there, it’s about introduction of more compound classes

we only had synthons introduced during lecture at around 4th year, and only for ochem path, it’s not doing a lot at that point and imo would have much more impact right after ochem intro course

i always thought that the idea of synthons should be taught early on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthon

i’d say it’s more important to learn mechanisms because this way you can notice these patterns of reactivity easier. at some point you’d only get new reactions that are really just pieces of other reactions you know put in a new way

there’s zero reason to make chart like this, it’s both barely comprehensible and touching surface level stuff only (where are palladium couplings for one)

you can just put a flywheel on synchronous machine and it also works, especially where you have infra left over after coal plant shutdown or something similar

they might have done it this way because hydro, nuclear (or any steam turbine based) or gas (or any gas turbine based) generation is rotating generation, which helps to stabilize grid in a way that solar or (some of) wind power doesn’t. on top of that, many of solar installations won’t output energy without mains (grid-followers). getting rid of that would be a is a complex problem that would require infrastructure buildout and policy changes