Episode 77 of the juice box podcast is sponsored by Insulate, makers of the omnipod, the world's only tubeless

insulin pump.

With so much talk in the news about epipen pricing and now insulin costs, I thought this is the

right time to talk to Anthony de Franko.

I heard you sit in your car, you just said who? Anthony de Franko, what does that mean?

Anthony is a Yale grad. He is a super smart guy. He is a motivated gentleman. He's also got the spirit of a young man, of an inventor, of a scientist, and he wants to make the world a better place. He also has type 1 diabetes and he's trying to make insulin by himself in a laboratory.

Well, not by himself. There's something called the Open Insulum Project. There's a group of people in a

lab that's crowd-sourced trying to make insulin. That sounded like an interesting

conversation to have, especially with what's going on in the world today.

Our conversation, you know, it just got deeper than I thought it was, you know, we started talking about the idea of making insulin and kind of the real scientific nuts and bolts and the patent ideas and you know all the intricacies of it.

Our conversation quickly switched and we just started talking more about the ideas behind it

you know more about the ideas behind it, you know, more about the community and the people.

And I even sort of played Devil's Advocate and argued both sides.

Because I have to admit, I also understand companies trying to make a profit and I

understand you not wanting your life to be about profit.

So there's a lot of different aspects of this conversation and Anthony I did a pretty good job talking about most of them.

Let's see what you think.

My name is Anthony DeFranco. I'm working on the Open Insulin Project at Counterculture Labs in

Oakland for about a year. I have Type 1 1 diabetes myself which is one of the reasons that it's an interesting question to work on for me.

I was diagnosed with it about 10 years ago.

So you're in your early 30s?

Yeah.

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