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posted by on Thursday December 01 2016, @04:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the scientists-in-the-making dept.

The ABC news website (an Australian national news service funded by the Australian government) reports on a group of high school students from Sydney Australia who have managed to recreate the active ingredient in Daraprim for a mere $20.

Daraprim has received a lot of coverage recently after Turing Pharmaceuticals who owns the patent, initially raised the price of the drug from $13.50 to $750.00, though they have since stated that the price will be reduced.

From the article:

For $US20, a group of high school students has created 3.7 grams of an active ingredient used in the medicine Daraprim, which would sell in the United States for between $US35,000 and $US110,000.

Pyrimethamine, the active ingredient in Daraprim, treats a parasitic infection in people with weak immune systems such as pregnant women and HIV patients.

In August 2015, the price of Daraprim in the US rose from $US13.50 per tablet to $US750 when Turing Pharmaceuticals, and its controversial then-chief executive Martin Shkreli, acquired the drug's exclusive rights and hiked up the price.

Since then, the 17-year-olds from Sydney Grammar have worked in their school laboratory to create the drug cheaply in order to draw attention to its inflated price overseas, which student Milan Leonard said was "ridiculous".


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @08:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @08:49PM (#435659)

    The R&D and testing to bring a drug to market are expensive and risky. The company gets a patent and a worldwide monopoly on production and distribution to recoup those costs rapidly. After that, the drug is supposed to become unencumbered and participate in healthy, free market economy.

    Daraprim, for example, was patented in 1933 and has been available for generic manufacture since 1953. This is why you could get it in the US for $13, in Canada for $1, and in most of the rest of the world for less than that. It's profit margin is so low there's only one FDA-approved US manufacturer. When Shkreli bought it, he realized that this pill is life-and-death for some people and decided to raise the price to reflect the value of the life saved (rather than the cost of production). This is what capitalists do: they charge what the market will bear.

    In a healthy market, a competitor would jump in, ramp up production and undercut Shkreli by 10% (satisfying himself with a mere 80,000% profit margin), and so on, until the price returned to something close to the cost of production. Due to FDA, any company that wishes to produce a competing implementation must first demonstrate that it is functionally equivalent to the available product. If Shkreli refuses to sell Daraprim to potential competitors, they can not make that demonstration. Nor do they have any reason to believe that, having invested the capital to test and produce their own Daraprim, Shkreli would not immediately return to the $13 pricing, eliminating any chance for the new player to profit. (This part is very much the same reason incumbent ISPs don't have any real competition).

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