Ex-drug exec Shkreli has $40 million trading loss

At the center of the investigation is Turing’s former CEO Martin Shkreli, who became the poster child of pharmaceutical-industry greed last fall for hiking the price of a life-saving drug by more than 5,000 percent.

The committee received more than 250,000 pages of documents turned over by Turing and more than 74,000 pages from Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a second company that appears to have built its business model around significant price increases of drugs that it did not invent.

Two drugmakers have made a practice of buying, and then dramatically hiking the prices of, low-cost drugs given to patients with life-threatening conditions including heart disease, AIDS and cancer, according to excerpts from thousands of documents released by federal lawmakers.

But the documents released today provide “a rare, inside look at the motivations and tactics of drug company executives”, said Democratic Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the committee’s ranking member.

Mr. Shkreli’s arguments say that Daraprim was such a small-selling drug that the price increase would not affect the health care system.

The documents – more than 300,000 pages of emails and forecasts – capture moves made by executives at both drug makers as they sought to boost sales while avoiding the fallout that comes from high drug prices.

Also appearing before the lawmakers was Turing’s chief commercial officer and the interim CEO of Canada’s largest drugmaker, Valeant Pharmaceuticals.

Shkreli, 32, who has been dubbed a “pharma bro”, said he planned to “insult” and “berate” Congress, but would otherwise invoke his fifth amendment right not to testify.

Turing said in a statement it cut the price of Daraprim by up to 50 percent for hospitals.

Turing said in a statement Tuesday that it set the drug price to “balance patient access to our existing drugs with investment in research and value generation for our shareholders”.

The company also said it is making overall changes in how it runs its business and “going forward, we expect our growth to be driven more by volume than by price”.

“HIV patient advocacy may react to price increase… we still come out ahead if we can frame this issue within the HIV/AIDS community as a fight between a drug company and insurance companies”.

Three months later, after the acquisition, Shkreli wrote about projections that Daraprim would bring in $375 million a year, after the price of the drug was raised.

On 9 September, 2015, a Turing account manager said that Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami reported they were unable to afford the $750 per 25mg price tag “when the induction therapy typically begins at 200mg and subsequently 75mg/day”.

The Sheepshead Bay-reared villain emerged from obscurity after he hiked the price of an HIV drug and then seemed to celebrate the ferocious backlash.

Valeant used patient assistance programs to distrthat act attention and justify its price hikes, according to the memo. “Valeant raised the prices of several of these products multiple times from 2014 to 2015, in some cases by as much as 800%”, according to the Oversight Committee.