Yes, but the answer depends on what you mean. Your body makes insulin naturally in the pancreas, pharmaceutical companies manufacture it on an industrial scale using genetically engineered bacteria or yeast, and a small number of biohacker groups are attempting to produce it in community labs. Each version of “making insulin” works very differently and comes with its own set of challenges.
How Your Body Makes Insulin
Insulin is produced by beta cells, a specialized cell type clustered in small groups called islets within the pancreas. The process starts with a much larger molecule, a 110-amino-acid precursor called preproinsulin. This precursor gets trimmed and folded inside the cell in stages. First, a signal portion is clipped off, leaving proinsulin. That proinsulin then folds into its correct three-dimensional shape, held together by chemical bonds. Finally, it’s cut one more time into two pieces: the finished insulin molecule (51 amino acids) and a byproduct called C-peptide.
The finished insulin is packed into tiny storage compartments called granules, where it’s held as dense crystals at extremely high concentrations, roughly 40 times more concentrated than you’d find in the bloodstream. When blood sugar rises after a meal, beta cells release these granules on demand. A healthy pancreas contains enough stored insulin to respond quickly to incoming glucose, keeping blood sugar in a tight range throughout the day.
In type 1 diabetes, the immune system destroys beta cells, eliminating the body’s ability to produce insulin entirely. In type 2 diabetes, beta cells still make insulin, but either not enough of it or the body’s tissues stop responding to it effectively. Both situations create the need for insulin made outside the body.
How Pharmaceutical Companies Manufacture Insulin
Before the 1980s, all medical insulin came from the pancreases of pigs and cattle. That changed with recombinant DNA technology, which allows scientists to insert the human insulin gene into bacteria or yeast and let those organisms produce the protein in large fermentation tanks.
The basic process works like this: researchers synthesize the human insulin gene in a lab, then splice it into a small loop of bacterial DNA called a plasmid. That modified plasmid is inserted back into bacteria (typically E. coli) or yeast cells. The engineered microorganisms are grown in industrial fermentation tanks, where they read the inserted gene and churn out insulin as if it were one of their own proteins. The insulin is then harvested from the tanks, separated from the bacteria, and purified for medical use.
This process ended any fear of running out of animal-sourced pancreases and made insulin remarkably cheap to produce. Human insulin costs an estimated $2.28 to $3.37 per 1,000-unit vial to manufacture. At that price, a person taking 40 units per day could be supplied for less than $71 per year, even with a 30 percent profit margin built in.
Insulin Analogs: Tweaking the Molecule
Standard human insulin works, but it doesn’t perfectly mimic the way a healthy pancreas delivers insulin. So manufacturers have created modified versions called analogs by making small changes to insulin’s amino acid sequence. These changes alter how quickly insulin molecules clump together or break apart after injection, which controls how fast or slow the insulin reaches the bloodstream.
Rapid-acting analogs are engineered so the molecules separate quickly at the injection site, getting to work within minutes. Long-acting analogs do the opposite. Insulin glargine, for example, has two extra amino acids added to one chain and one swapped out on another, which makes it less soluble under the skin. It dissolves slowly and steadily over roughly 24 hours, mimicking the low-level background insulin a healthy pancreas provides between meals. These modifications give people with diabetes a toolkit of insulins that can be combined to approximate normal pancreatic function throughout the day.
Why Insulin Costs So Much More Than It Costs to Make
The gap between manufacturing cost and retail price is enormous. A vial of the analog lispro (brand name Humalog) went from $21 in 1999 to $322 in 2019 in the United States, a 1,500 percent increase. Analog insulins generally cost about six times more than older human insulin formulations. Meanwhile, in low- and middle-income countries where people buy insulin closer to production cost, a year’s supply through the public sector averages about $35.
Some of this price gap reflects the regulatory cost of bringing insulin to market. To get a biosimilar insulin approved in the U.S., a manufacturer needs to demonstrate the product is “highly similar” to an existing reference product through detailed analytical comparisons, pharmacology studies measuring how the insulin behaves in the body, and a validated manufacturing process subject to FDA facility inspections. Clinical trials comparing the biosimilar’s blood sugar effects against the reference product using specialized testing procedures are typically required. These requirements can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, creating a barrier that discourages generic competition. Walmart does sell an older human insulin formulation for about $25 per vial, or roughly $1 per day for an average user, but many people need the more precise timing that analogs provide.
Can You Make Insulin Yourself?
In theory, the science is not a secret. The human insulin gene is well characterized, the recombinant DNA techniques are decades old, and the original patents on human insulin have expired. A group called the Open Insulin Project, along with other biohacker communities, has been working to develop an open-source protocol for producing insulin in small, community-scale labs.
In practice, the obstacles are significant. The biological manufacturing process requires precise conditions to produce insulin that is pure, correctly folded, and free of dangerous contaminants. Biologic drugs like insulin are far harder to quality-control than simple chemical pills. Even tiny differences in the production process can change the final product in ways that affect safety and potency. For personal use, you wouldn’t face patent infringement issues, but you would face the very real risk of injecting a substance that hasn’t been verified for purity or dosing accuracy, which with insulin could be fatal. Too much causes dangerously low blood sugar; too little doesn’t control the disease.
If a group wanted to actually distribute homemade insulin to others, they would need regulatory approval, which means proving biological consistency and safety through processes that could cost $250 million or more. Without the ability to patent a product based on expired technology, there’s little financial incentive to absorb those costs. If biosimilarity could someday be confirmed without full clinical trials, development costs would drop dramatically, but that regulatory shift hasn’t happened yet.
Stem Cell Approaches to Restoring Insulin Production
Rather than manufacturing insulin in a factory, some researchers are trying to grow new insulin-producing beta cells from human stem cells and implant them into people with type 1 diabetes. The idea is to restore the body’s own ability to make insulin, essentially replacing what the immune system destroyed.
Early results are promising but limited. In a phase 1/2 clinical trial using stem cell-derived beta cells encapsulated in implantable devices, 3 out of 10 patients with type 1 diabetes began producing detectable levels of their own insulin from about six months onward. The patient with the strongest response saw their time spent in a healthy blood sugar range jump from 55 percent to 85 percent over 12 months, with reduced need for injected insulin. However, only about 4 percent of the implanted cells survived and matured into functioning beta cells in that patient, suggesting the devices don’t yet support enough blood vessel growth to keep a large mass of cells alive and working. Previous attempts with lower cell doses produced insulin output too low to provide any clinical benefit. The technology works in principle but needs substantial improvement before it could replace insulin injections for most people.
The First Insulin Ever Made
The story of externally produced insulin begins in 1921, when surgeon Frederick Banting and medical student Charles Best performed experiments on dogs at the University of Toronto. They tied off the pancreatic ducts in dogs to destroy the organ’s digestive tissue while preserving the insulin-producing islet cells, then used the remaining extract to lower blood sugar in diabetic animals. A biochemist named James Collip refined the extraction process, developing a method using alcoholic acid extracts from ox and pig pancreases that proved more effective and practical for human use. Before this work, a type 1 diabetes diagnosis was a death sentence. Within months of the discovery, children near death from diabetes were being revived with injections of animal-derived insulin.