Jim Wilkins pulled a test tube from the freezer of his home on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, stuck it in his pocket, and jumped on his Ducati ST4 motorcycle. He crossed the Bay Bridge to Oakland and pulled up in front of the rambling, two-story Omni Community Center, which once housed a heavy-metal bar and before that a social club for Italian garbage scavengers.
Wilkins came bearing a gift. The flask in his pocket contained a special strain of yeast that had been genetically engineered to carry the DNA sequence needed to make human insulin. Inside the Omni, at a DIY biotech facility called Counter Culture Labs, a band of biohackers led by Anthony Di Franco and Yann Huon de Kermadec had been eagerly awaiting their present. De Kermadec and Wilkins went to work, seeding the yeast onto a biological scaffold to start a new colony.
Wilkins’s ride across the bay opened a new chapter in an effort with big ambitions — to disrupt the $25 billion insulin market with a cheap, generic version. After two years of work in their Oakland labs, Di Franco, de Kermadec, and other collaborators had managed to engineer E. coli bacteria to produce proinsulin, a precursor to insulin. But E. coli can’t produce mature insulin directly. With additional bioengineering, yeast like what Wilkins delivered may present a more efficient method.
If anyone in this cross-bay collaboration ends up producing high-quality generic insulin, it would be a major breakthrough. The three companies that make nearly 90 percent of the insulin sold in the world nearly tripled the price in the U.S. between 2002 and 2013. In sub-Saharan Africa, low access to insulin means children diagnosed with diabetes have a life expectancy of one year.
The partnership might also offer lessons on how much garage biohackers can achieve on their own. If the crew at Counter Culture Labs are rebels trying to storm the biotech citadel, Wilkins is a reformer who wants to change the industry he’s been part of for three decades. He has been a senior scientist at Genentech, a vice president at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, and a research professor at Yale. Now he has a research appointment at the University of California, San Francisco, studying proteins.