Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, has finally received his just deserts. Back in August, Turing Pharmaceuticals purchased the rights to the 62-year-old drug Daraprim, whose active ingredient pyrimethamine is used to treat life-threatening parasitic infections in people with weakened immune systems, and then proceeded to hike its price up by over 5,500%, from $13.50 a tablet to $750. Three months later, Turing has reported a net loss of $14.6 million in the third quarter of 2015. Seems like a proper comeuppance for a man who managed to make both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump hate him.
This profit loss wasn’t completely unexpected though; Shkreli foresaw his company losing money when he announced the price increase, saying that Turing would use the money to develop better treatments for toxoplasmosis, the condition Daraprim is used to treat. Shkreli keeping his word seems somewhat unlikely, however, given his previous reputation: back in 2014, Shkreli was fired from his job as CEO of Retrophin, another pharmaceutical company, for supposedly using Retrophin as his “personal piggy bank” to pay back unhappy investors in his hedge fund. In the same way, Shkreli could just be using Turing for personal profit, using the plight of those with toxoplasmosis to satisfy his own greed.
However, that isn’t the end of the storm of controversy. Recently, faced with waves of criticism from just about everyone, from patients to doctors to journalists and even to politicians, Turing promised to lower the price of the drug. And they did, but not really in a way that will help anyone. Rather than cutting the price for individuals and insurance companies, the company decided to cut the price by 50%, but only for hospitals. This certainly won’t help those with toxoplasmosis, who are now faced with two choices for obtaining Daraprim: they can either buy it through their insurance companies, who will be forced to hike up those patients’ insurance fees, or they could stay at a hospital for months on end, which is an even worse option. Even hospitals will still have to pay a whopping $375 per pill, which may discourage many hospitals from keeping the drug in stock.
Fortunately, there is still a ray of hope for those with toxoplasmosis. A competing company, Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, began selling pyrimethamine pills for only one dollar per capsule last month, reducing the drug’s price down to almost production cost. This also isn’t the only drug whose price Imprimis is going to cut; according to the CEO of Imprimis, Mark Baum, “[Imprimis] will work with physicians and their patients to ensure they have affordable access to the medicines they need from the over 7,800 generic FDA-approved drugs”. Imprimis is likely to face backlash from other pharmaceutical companies as well as the FDA, but if there’s anything the United States’ pharmaceutical industry could learn from the rest of the world, it’s that drug prices should be kept under control, and Imprimis is helping to do just that.
Leave a Reply