Company hikes price 5000% for drug that fights cancer complications

Martin Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager who is now chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals AG, was called out by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The drug, Daraprim, treats a parasitic infection that can be deadly for the immunosuppressed, such as AIDS and cancer patients. Immediately after acquiring the 62-year-old drug, Shkreli raised the price from $13.50 a tablet to $750.

The reasons behind increasing generic drug prices are not related to research or development costs, as new drugs would be; instead, experts say it’s more about economics.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association sent a letter to Turing earlier this month, saying the price increase is “unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population”.

On Monday, Mr Shkreli told Bloomberg News that firms that had previously owned the rights to the drug had been “virtually giving it away”.

People whose insurance plans require a 20 percent co-payment of the cost would be required to cough up $150 a pill. But behind them lurks a real lesson about the way drugs are priced in the US , and what role they actually play in the trillion-dollar fight over controlling healthcare costs.

“The enormous, overnight price increase for Daraprim is just the latest in a long list of skyrocketing price increases for certain critical medications”, Sanders and Cummings said.

“Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous”.

“Turing is a very small company, it’s a new company, and we’re not a profitable company”.

A drug price plan could be a part of a group of health proposals from Clinton, who said Sunday on the television program “Face the Nation” that she had several ideas on health care. In a note to Turing Pharmaceuticals, IDSA calls for the immediate revision of the pricing strategy. An organization representing the directors of state AIDS programs has also been looking into the price increase, according to doctors and patient advocates.

“There has been no innovation in dealing with toxoplasmosis“, he said. CorePharma, in turn, sold the drug to another company, Impax Laboratories, and Turing bought Daraprim in August.