Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do “right to repair for your body.”
Laufer has become well known for handing out DIY pills and medicines at hacking conferences, which include, for example, courses of the abortion drug misoprostol that can be manufactured for 89 cents (normal cost: $160) and which has become increasingly difficult to obtain in some states following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs.
In our call, Laufer had just explained that Four Thieves’ had made some miscalculations as part of its latest project, to create instructions for replicating sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), a miracle drug that cures hepatitis C, which he planned to explain and reveal at the DEF CON hacking conference. Unlike many other drugs that treat viruses, Sovaldi does not suppress hepatitis C, a virus that kills roughly 250,000 people around the world each year. It cures it.
“The holy grail for every virologist is to find a way to drain the viral reservoir, and Sovaldi does this. You take one pill of Sovaldi a day for 12 weeks and then you don’t have hepatitis C anymore.” The problem is that those pills are under patent, and they cost $1,000 per pill.
“Literally, if you have $84,000 then hepatitis C is not your problem anymore,” Laufer said. “But given that there are other methodologies for managing hepatitis C that are not curing it and that are cheaper, insurance typically will not cover [Sovaldi]. And so we’ve got this incredible technology and it’s sitting on the shelf except for people who are ridiculously wealthy.”
So Four Thieves Vinegar Collective set out to teach people how to make their own version of Sovaldi. Chemists at the collective thought the DIY version would cost about $300 for the entire course of medication, or about $3.57 per pill. But they were wrong. “It’s actually just a little under $70 (83 cents per pill), which just kind of blew my mind when they finally showed me the results,” Laufer said. “I was like, can we do the math here again?”
A miracle drug called Kalydeco had recently been approved for use on some patients with cystic fibrosis. It cost $311,000 per patient, per year.
Laufer explains that both precursors needed to make Kalydeco are available commercially, and that one costs $1 per gram and the other costs $28 per gram. He checks the daily dosage (roughly 300 mg per day), and Chemhacktica spits out a potential yield. He explains that, in back-of-the-envelope math, “me, a non-chemist doing a first pass,” Kalydeco could be made “in the range of $10 a day for raw materials.” When Kalydeco was first introduced, it cost roughly $820 per patient per day.
Very cool that they’ve published a FOSS version of in-silico synthetic software plus designed a jacketed reactor (much more convenient than babysitting a round bottomed flask in a mantle for 12 hours), but I can’t see it getting to very high or even mildy low temps.
I don’t see much about cleaning the reactor feedlines or reactant reservoirs, nor how you take a reaction product and work it up, or purify it for that matter, in preparation for the next synthetic step. Classico synthesis traditionally structurally elucidates each step’s purified product with NMR before carrying it forward to the next rxn. But I’m a lazy chemist so I’d prefer to program microbes to make things for me (:
Verifying that what you made is what you think you made seems to be a major problem here
Absolutely, and I don’t see biohackers offering up cheap NMR or MS/MS detectors to solve the common issue of inadvertently making side products like MPTP when attempting to cook up MPPP or whatever, consequently injecting Parkinson’s into yourself. So you’re still bound by the enormous costs of getting an analytical lab stood up, despite using “AI” assisted synthetic software to substitute for real verification of each purified intermediate product. Also my other chem friend & I think that Vinni guy is an annoying ted-talk dude fwiw.
These are pretty esoteric points for anyone who hasn’t taken a few hours worth of orgo lab which is what, .05 percent of the population maybe? For that reason this project to me seems to be more dangerous than good, even if it comes from a place of noble intentions.
What we actually need is some framework to retain the ability to perform complex capital intensive tasks while stripping out the profit motive
This is a collective problem requiring collective solutions, the irony is not lost on me that these guys call themselves a collective
Not to mention meeting standards of purity and formulating your medication so it’s shelf stable and the active pharm ingredient can be distributed within the body effectively once the medicine is administered.
I’ve had similar thoughts as these jokers but with using bioreactors. Each time I conclude that the solution is a centralized manufacturing facility owned by workers to effectively produce at scale (and ensure you don’t poison people).
Sure, you’re not gonna build that misoprostol plant in Texas, but there’s other options to obtain properly-manufactured medication before you drink a mystery brew cooked up by an anarchist squatter named Spoon.
To be fair, Spoon does have a PhD in biochemistry
Dr. Spoon’s more credentialed than my washed out academic career; my hating has been defeated by meritocracy!