Second Stretch Goal

Hope everyone is enjoying a good digestion this evening!

The word about Open Insulin has spread globally! We’ve had 6 websites mention our project including Vice Magazine, International Business Times, The Guardian, and Popular Science. This increased attention has brought more experts offering their assistance on the project, about a half-dozen new biochemists and synthetic biologists have gotten in touch with us so far.

The first stretch goal was intended to allow us to create two forms of the proinsulin construct. Now we're raising funds to research the steps to cut and fold proinsulin. This is the main work to be done, so we'll need to upgrade the capabilities of the lab a bit and continue work on getting our protocols fully documented and buy reagents and kits for each step. We've already begun inventorying reagents and ordering the ones we're missing. The main additional budget items so far are these:

• Biosafety Level 2 facilities upgrade: ensure we can safely work with human cell lines for cell-based assays
• human insulin and IGF-1 ELISA kits: these will let us test whether our insulin is folded correctly such that it is fully active, and ensure our product doesn't have unusually high activity at the IGF-1 receptor, which is similar to the insulin receptor
• spectrophotometer: monitor our cell concentrations as we grow our cultures
• cell-based insulin and IGF1R assays: alternative to ELISA kits

Meanwhile, we've only got just a little more than a week left in our campaign! Please continue to help us spread the word. The budget is still very tight so every little bit more we raise will help to enable a great deal more progress.