Brandeis Magazine
His Prescription for Affordable Insulin
By Hannah Van Sickle
Eric Moyal ’17, IBS MA’18, MS’22 — a 2024 BOLD Rising Star Award recipient — is on a mission to rein in the exorbitant cost of insulin.
Currently, more than a million people in the U.S. who rely on insulin to treat diabetes have to ration their supply, taking less than they need because they simply can’t afford it.
In 2022, Moyal founded Project Insulin to address the problem of insulin’s affordability and accessibility. The nonprofit aims to manufacture a generic version of the drug and distribute it directly to patients at cost — via a mail-order pharmacy and health-care clinics across the U.S. — regardless of insurance coverage.
To help launch his nonprofit, Moyal turned to the Brandeis Virtual Incubator. The $2,500 he won in the university’s SparkTank pitch contest led to several $50,000 grants from other sources. In May, he won a $10,000 pitch contest from a social-impact accelerator program. Last fall, his work caught the attention of The Boston Globe, which devoted an “Innovator Q&A” column to him.
“No one’s path is linear, but the things you learn along the way will likely lead you to your destination.”
“Meeting people where they are is a really important part of our strategy,” says Moyal, who understands lifelong illness. His younger sister lives with a rare chronic-pain condition. His partner has Type 1 diabetes. When the couple met in 2020, Moyal was shocked to learn that, despite having an expired patent, insulin kept getting more expensive.
“Making insulin affordable is not a scientific problem, it’s a money problem,” says Moyal, who seeks to eliminate the distributors who make the drug so costly for patients.
In addition to developing ways of bypassing the middlemen, Project Insulin plans to develop its generic insulin over the next few months. “It’s a monumental milestone,” Moyal says.
A business major who originally planned to pursue sports management, Moyal says his knowledge of patent law came from several legal-studies courses at Brandeis and, after graduation, a five-year stint working in the university’s development office taught him how to run an organization specifically focused on fundraising.
In addition, he says, friends from his undergraduate years have given him legal advice, and he’s consulted with alumni who have built life sciences companies from scratch.
Today, Moyal says he advises young alumni, “No one’s path is linear, but the things you learn along the way will likely lead you to your destination.”
He says, “I am not a science person, which made it hard to gain traction at times. But I have always been willing to ask others, ‘I don’t know anything about this — can you help me learn?’”