Sharing because I found this very interesting.
The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has a DIY design for a home lab you can set up to reproduce expensive medication for dirt cheap, producing medication like that used to cure Hepatitis C, along with software they developed that can be used to create chemical compounds out of common household materials.
By far one of the most interesting articles I’ve seen on Lemmy so far, thanks for the link
This is super cool and helpful as a resource but I really don’t think people without a chemistry background should be doing anything more than following precise instructions, hopefully with some form of verification test at the end. The idea to have people without a chemistry background use a forked version of askcos and just run with it is a little scary.
The affordable Controlled Lab Reactor for diy is fantastic for helping people follow precise instructions to the letter just all of those instructions should be meticulously vetted by actual chemists and have some safeguard tests at the end where necessary. It seems the founder wants that vision too at the end of the conference just there’s not enough of a community yet to support it.
Yeah… This is a bit sketchy. Pharmaceuticals aren’t just something that an amateur can make by following step by step instructions. Even something as simple as baking a cake requires some basic experience to know when things are going right or wrong.
Even maintaining the calibration on a CLR requires some background experience, let alone building and programming one all on your own. With your actual reactor being as small as a mason jar, it means the margin for error is going to be small as well.
This is neat for people with a background in chemistry, but I don’t really see it as anything but dangerous for the general public. They also are fudging their math a bit to make things seem a lot cheaper. Reagents can be really cheap at bulk prices, but you have to spend the time looking for them, and they aren’t equating the cost of a trained chemist making these medications.
Man, I would be so worried about impurities and side reactions. A good example is the recalls of drugs because of nitrosamine contamination. If stuff like this already happens to the experts.
And what is with the whole galenics side? How to make sure the absorption is about right…
I was first on the fence, but yeah, at the very least, it’s a clear signal to big pharma, and I welcome that move. Also, if this will actually get safe, reliable, and controlled enough, I’d love to have some basic spare parts and make my meds at home. But that would probably require something more complex than Microlab.
Don’t trust your life with this unless you have to. Curious project nonetheless!
This could be very good for people with orphan diseases(diseases that are rare enough that they aren’t profitable for private companies to research)
Also, having an orphan disease often results in insurance companies denying coverage for everything because they don’t have a policy written up for that specific disease… so there’s no script for the workers to follow. Then your doctor has to argue with them, which can take weeks, in the meantime you have no medication.
Yeah, I’m not mad or anything. I wish I could’ve cooked up my own meds when insurance denied me life giving meds because they’d never heard of my disorder.
True! Hopefully, their tools are able to suggest ways to safely produce those meds, too.
Also, I strongly hope they’ll build something able to accurately verify that processes went through as intended, with the desired product present and no known and harmful or unknown compounds formed. Chemistry is full of surprises, especially organic one…
That would ideal! Also it’d be good if it didn’t accidentally explode like meth labs tend to. Like you said, chemistry isn’t easy, but if this thing can work it’d make us far less dependent on greedy insurance companies and corrupt pharma companies.
Insurance is absolutely, unambiguously, the worst. I had a stress echocardiogram denied by insurance yesterday because they don’t think I need it. A test to try to identify a problem, what’s my alternative? Wait to see if I drop dead? I guess in that sense I don’t need it but c’mon. And I’m on one of the “good” plans.
It seems like “deny everything and we’ll save money on the people that can’t/won’t fight the denial” is actually common practice now.
I hope their actuaries get to experience the bullshit and have time to regret their contributions to human suffering.
This is fantastic. If you know what the problem is, because you’ve been diagnosed or whatever, and you know what medicine will do it, and you are capable of making it, I see no issue at all with this. You don’t need a PhD in computer science to browse the internet.
You’ve gone to a malicious website. Now you’ve died.
See, the risks of surfing the web incorrectly are slightly different than the risks of creating medicine incorrectly.
Idk. Medicine is one of those skills where I prefer someone that has studied for 7 years vs me who watches a 15 min how to video and read webmd
Well that’s the coolest part about this, everything is based on the existing research.
The drugs they’re making are the exact same chemical compounds formulated by the drug companies, and contrary to popular belief, the compounds can actually be relatively simple, it’s the process of finding which compound that takes the most money from R&D.
So if you have 2-3 very standard chemicals, with well known reactions and outcomes, and you have the exact blueprint of what the final result should look like, and you can chemically test it afterward to see if it combined as expected, then anyone who has enough reason to use this instead of traditional means (i.e. being priced out of lifesaving medication completely) can be reasonably confident it will work.
Obviously the people who would benefit most from this technology would prefer a doctor and pharmacy to be involved as well. The point is that personal preference doesn’t really mean much when the preferred option is inaccessible and the alternative is death or a dramatically reduced quality of life. You do the best with what you have.
You wouldn’t download a
carlife saving medicine!This is extremely dangerous and also something I feel must be considered a natural and obvious extension of a right I believe to be fundamental: bodily autonomy.
Would I do this? Probably not, maybe for some medicines, that are easily made administrable from bulk chemicals but likely not. But behind all rights stands bodily autonomy. It is your flesh and not mine. If we don’t want people doing this themselves the lever we should use is easing access to expert made medicines. Desperate people do stupid things.
Also this is cyberpunk as hell and aesthetically I’m so here for it
I think an off the shelf microlab that can reliably synthesize a particular medicine is something that’s commercially viable, which is probably a safe middle ground here and sort of what they’re proof of concepting.
Rather than putting together a DIY lab like this, a pre-made kit that makes one medication would easily make a ton of meds available. Not just here but all around the world.
I would say the next step would probably be to create a certification process for microlabs categorizing their safety and effectiveness
This is extremely dangerous and also something I feel must be considered a natural and obvious extension of a right I believe to be fundamental: bodily autonomy.
There is a significant distinction between the right to bodily autonomy and the right to distribute quack medicine. And that’s sort of the rub. As soon as you start marketing your product to third parties under false pretexts, we’re not longer talking about an individual’s right to self. And we get into an even more tangled web when we start talking about health care for children or the elderly, who lack the mental acuity to make informed choices.
Also this is cyberpunk as hell and aesthetically I’m so here for it
Everyone wants to get the military grade Sandevistan drive. Nobody thinks they’re going to succumb to cyberpsychosis.
Compounding pharmacies should not be subjected to patents. Then the costs are all local instead of tithes to the corporate clergy.
They have released a guide on making a CLR (basically several different pieces of lab equipment controlled to automate some of the process) and software to run on it to assist in the process of making the medications. Specifically to try and improve consistency of the medications produced.
It’s a really great cause. Worth reading the article. If someone had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars cost to access life-saving medication, and they couldn’t afford it, something like this could legitimately save their life.
And it’s only made more inspiring by the fact that he has his own personal history with the pharmaceutical industry that didn’t work for him.
I found another article on him and the collective, and there’s this honestly saddening quote:
“A toast to the dead, for children with cancer and AIDS,” Laufer said, raising a glass of bourbon and quoting the hip hop artist Felipe Andres Coronel, better known as Immortal Technique. “A cure exists, and you probably could have been saved.”
It’s even posted up on their page for the MicroLab right at the top.
I fucking love pirate medicine. Fuck the US healthcare system, what good is having the “best healthcare in the world” if you can’t even afford mediocre healthcare?
If it was the best healthcare in the world, we’d have the best outcomes and we don’t even have that for rich people. We have a (non-metric) shit ton of world class research universities and highly respected agencies like the FDA and NIH but Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, can’t even get the mental health services he obviously needs.
I’d obviously rather go to an American hospital than a hospital in most of the world but spending a lot to cover up a shitty system isn’t as good as a functioning system.
Edit: I originally had NHS instead of NIH but the NHS, is, obviously, where British people get their brain medicines.
I believe every American knows someone whose life is made substantially worse because of a lack of access to healthcare.
I want to set this up and learn to use it. I want to keep it and maintain it and wait. Because I’ll inevitably hear from someone that they can’t afford their life-saving medication.
Oh, also I have an exceedingly rare hereditary disease, so it feels like a certainty I’ll need it for myself someday.
I know someone whose life is made substantially worse because they have a lack of access to healthcare. They live in Europe and can’t get access to the specialized medicine that they need in the timeframe that they need it in. I’m not saying that socialized medicine is bad—I’m actually all for it—but it needs to be implemented well for it to actually work. This is just my anecdotal evidence to say that just because everyone has access doesn’t automatically mean it’s adequate access.
I can’t really comment on the European experience though, so I said American, which I am, and which I am qualified to talk about.
Haha that name is fantastic! It’s a riff on the best selling vinegar that you get at Costco and similar places called “Four Monks” vinegar.
Actually it’s the name for a mix of vinegar, garlic, and herbs that was a home remedy to help prevent the plague.
Oh interesting, I guess I had the name attribution backwards!
…well, this is a good way to shine the spotlight on a massive problem. I’d be pretty hesitant to take DIY meds unless it was life-critical and my only option (which… lots of don’t have that option, and just die after hitting the health paygate…). The value here is its potential to slap some sense into the US and get our broken-as-fuck healthcare system caught up with the rest of the world so people don’t need moonshine insulin or w/e in the first place.
That this conversation is even taking place is testament to how horrible our current system is.
Four Thieves are legit. Controversial but they’re confronting a lot of uncomfortable truths that need to be addressed .
