Water For The Madman: Open Insulin Donation

Water For The Madman - Created By Billy White 

Live - January 20th, 21st 2023 - Jetty Theate NSW

The Show:
Comprising spoken word, music and film, this engaging and almost certainly enlightening performance art piece will beam a raw, uncompromising and personal light on themes of Type 1 diabetes, queerness and mental health, stylishly wrapped in a flourish of hope and redemption.

Artist: 
Billy White is an interdisciplinary artist based out of Coffs Harbour/Sydney, Australia.
He has been working as a performer & filmmaker across NSW for the past 15 years. His work often explores Type 1 Diabetes, queer themes & the human condition. 
His portfolio contains experimental video art, short films, documentaries, music videos & performance art. 
Billy holds a Bachelor Of Arts (Film Production) from The Australian Film & Television School.

I will be donating profits from my show Water For The Madman to the Open Insulin foundation.

Open Insulin Foundation: 

The Open Insulin Foundation is a non-profit creating the means for communities in-need to have local sources of safe, affordable, high-quality insulin.

Our governance is shared between people with diabetes and people working on the project. Our working groups collaborate to develop new tools for open drug production, from R&D to manufacturing for medical use. Our goal is that people living with diabetes and their communities can own and govern the organizations that produce the medicine they depend on to survive.

Originally named The Open Insulin Project, our work began in 2015 at Counter Culture Labs, a community biology lab in Oakland, California. Launching with a crowdfunding campaign that raised just over $16,000, we have since attracted participation from volunteers and community labs around the US and the world, with about two dozen active volunteers, twenty interns, and a large network of advisors. We are currently transitioning to become a registered non-profit 501(c)(3) organization under our new name, The Open Insulin Foundation.

No one should be deprived of access to life-saving medicine. Access to insulin must be guaranteed, not obtained conditionally from corporate manufacturers for outrageous prices. In order to give people who depend on insulin ownership over their lives, we will democratize the production of insulin. Communities will own the manufacturing systems and insulin will be produced and distributed on a local level.

Campaign:

In the past 20 years, insulin prices have risen nearly ninefold. As a result, one in four diabetics in the U.S. have reported rationing insulin. At Open Insulin we work to ensure that communities in need have access to safe, affordable, high-quality insulin. To aid that, we are developing a small-scale model for decentralized manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals run by and for local communities. We aim to accomplish this by making the technology and knowledge for the purification of insulin available to community groups, and then organizing those groups to produce insulin.

Making Open Insulin available to consumers is estimated to take several years after proceeding through various stages:

• Research and Development: engineering organisms to produce active insulin and optimize methods to purify it from the cells at laboratory scale
• Regulatory Approval: generate scientific data and documentation necessary to demonstrate safety and efficacy 
• Engage local communities in manufacturing and distribution

In addition, we are developing and vetting open-hardware equivalents to production equipment to further reduce production costs. 

We have been able to successfully strategize and demonstrate the feasibility of this project, with the help of passionate volunteers and part-time workers. We have data strongly suggesting that we can produce both long-acting (glargine) and rapid-acting (lispro) insulin analogs.

Our monthly lab expenses are paid off by individual donations ~ $800/month. We launched fundraising campaigns to buy equipment (January 2020, $6,500 for a bioreactor). We have a grant with the Open Science Foundation to pay for a part-time worker.

Your donation will help us get closer to our goal. With a strong financial situation, we can pay for lab supplies, acquire lab equipment, recruit scientists, and pay for consultation fees for regulation and manufacturing experts.

We will widely share our knowledge about microorganism engineering, protein production, navigating regulatory processes, and best practices for biomedicine production via informal publications, technical documentation, and discussion with other organizations with similar missions.

For more information please: https://openinsulin.org/