Conversation

Communist #China Just #Cured #Diabetes and America's Insulin Industry is Not Happy About it

..."The patient got a cell transplant back in July 2021 at Shanghai Changzheng Hospital. And get this — within eleven weeks, no more insulin injections. Then over the next year? They slowly stopped taking their oral meds too. Just… stopped needing them.

Dr. Yin Hao, one of the researchers leading this thing, said follow-up exams showed the patient’s pancreatic islet function was “effectively restored.” The patient hasn’t needed insulin for 33 months now. Thirty-three months.

So what did they actually do?

They grew copies of the patient’s own insulin-producing cells in a lab, then transplanted them back into the body. Essentially gave the pancreas its function back. The body just started regulating blood sugar on its own again, the way it’s supposed to.
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Diabetes is brutal. Your body can’t convert food into energy properly, and if you don’t manage it, things get really bad really fast. The usual treatment? Insulin shots and pills. Every day. For life. It’s expensive, it’s exhausting, and it never ends.
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Three companies basically run the global insulin game: Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and Eli Lilly. That last one? American. And they’ve been making obscene amounts of money off people who literally need their product to survive.

The global insulin market is currently valued at somewhere between $28–34 billion annually, with projections to reach over $40 billion by the 2030s. These three companies control over 90% of that market.
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The profit motive has created an actual moral atrocity. These companies didn’t invent insulin — that was discovered in 1921 by researchers who sold the patent for $1 because they believed everyone should have access to it. But these companies own the patents on the modern formulations and the manufacturing, and they’ve decided that maximizing shareholder value is more important than human lives."...