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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 26 2015, @07:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the business-being-good-to-the-common-man dept.

Discussion from a September SoylentNews article.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Stepping into the furor over eye-popping price spikes for old generic medicines, a maker of compounded drugs will begin selling $1 doses of Daraprim, whose price recently was jacked up to $750 per pill by Turing Pharmaceuticals.

San Diego-based Imprimis Pharmaceuticals Inc., which mixes approved drug ingredients to fill individual patient prescriptions, said Thursday it will supply capsules containing Daraprim's active ingredients, pyrimethamine and leucovorin, for $99 for a 100-capsule bottle, via its website.

The 3 1/2-year-old drug compounding firm also plans to start making inexpensive versions of other generic drugs whose prices have skyrocketed, Chief Executive Mark Baum told The Associated Press.

"We are looking at all of these cases where the sole-source generic companies are jacking the price way up," Baum said in an interview. "There'll be many more of these" compounded drugs coming in the near future.

The high price of prescription medicines in the U.S. — from drugs for cancer and rare diseases that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year down to once-cheap generic drugs now costing many times their old price — has become a hot issue in the 2016 presidential race.

News that Turing, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. and other drugmakers have bought rights to old, cheap medicines that are the only treatment for serious diseases and then hiked prices severalfold has angered patients. It's triggered government investigations, politicians' proposals to fight "price gouging," heavy media scrutiny and a big slump in biotech stock prices.

Well, that certainly didn't take long. At $99/100 pills, I expect the profits are slim indeed - but there is probably a profit. The company certainly can't afford to just give the stuff away.

So - if one company can show a profit at $1/pill, how in hell does anyone justify selling the pill for hundreds of dollars?


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @10:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @10:01AM (#254606)

    Am I the only one who on reading the head line wondered about the "Turing pill"? Is it a Turing machine in Pill form? The pill Alan Turing had to take because of his homosexuality? Or what?

    Of course the summary cleared that up. But I think the headline should have been tailored for the readership here, most of whom have probably never heard about the company Turing Pharmaceuticals, but know about Alan Turing, or at least know terms like Turing machine, Turing-complete or Turing test.

    It would also have been nice to say what this pill is actually for.

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  • (Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Monday October 26 2015, @01:24PM

    by cmn32480 (443) <reversethis-{moc.liamg} {ta} {08423nmc}> on Monday October 26 2015, @01:24PM (#254647) Journal

    A fair point. I have made the suggested adjustment. Thanks for pointing out the possible confusion.

    --
    "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
  • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Monday October 26 2015, @08:28PM

    by gman003 (4155) on Monday October 26 2015, @08:28PM (#254863)

    It would also have been nice to say what this pill is actually for.

    It's an anti-protozoal. If you don't remember high-school biology, protozoa are single-celled animals, like amoebae, which are distinct from bacteria. They're kind of like algae are to plants - single-celled, but still otherwise similar. Regular antibiotics do nothing against protozoa, since they're more like single-celled parasites than a bacterial infection.

    The most common worldwide protozoan infection is malaria, but that's essentially eliminated from the United States. Here, it's mostly used in the treatment of AIDS, to stave off opportunistic infections from protozoa like taxoplasmosis.