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Medicine that costs $1 to make raised in price from $13.50 to $750.00
The head of a US pharmaceutical company has defended his company's decision to raise the price of a 62-year-old medication used by Aids patients by over 5,000%. Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the rights to Daraprim in August.
CEO Martin Shkreli has said that the company will use the money it makes from sales to research new treatments. The drug is used treat toxoplasmosis, a parasitic affliction that affects people with compromised immune systems.
After Turning's acquisition, a dose of Daraprim in the US increased from $13.50 (£8.70) to $750. The pill costs about $1 to produce, but Mr Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager, said that does not include other costs like marketing and distribution.
Cost of Daraprim Medication Raised By Over 50 Times
BBC is reporting on a massive price hike of an essential drug used by AIDS patients:
The head of a US pharmaceutical company has defended his company's decision to raise the price of a 62-year-old medication used by Aids patients by over 5,000%. Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the rights to Daraprim in August. CEO Martin Shkreli has said that the company will use the money it makes from sales to research new treatments.
The drug is used treat toxoplasmosis, a parasitic affliction that affects people with compromised immune systems. After Turning's acquisition, a dose of Daraprim in the US increased from $13.50 (£8.70) to $750. The pill costs about $1 to produce, but Mr Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager, said that does not include other costs like marketing and distribution. "We needed to turn a profit on this drug," Mr Shkreli told Bloomberg TV. "The companies before us were just giving it away almost." On Twitter, Mr Shkreli mocked several users who questioned the company's decision, calling one reporter "a moron".
Why not switch to a generic pyrimethamine tablet? They don't exist right now, according to the New York Times (story includes examples of other recent price hikes):
With the price now high, other companies could conceivably make generic copies, since patents have long expired. One factor that could discourage that option is that Daraprim's distribution is now tightly controlled, making it harder for generic companies to get the samples they need for the required testing.
The switch from drugstores to controlled distribution was made in June by Impax, not by Turing. Still, controlled distribution was a strategy Mr. Shkreli talked about at his previous company as a way to thwart generics.
The drug is also used to treat malaria and appears on the World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines. Toxoplasmosis infections are a feline gift to the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @09:00PM
> More to the point, isn't the patent supposed to be all a person of average skill in the field needs to replicate the invention?
No. The specific formulation in the branded version is rarely specified in the patent. Remember, patents are written to be as broad and generic as possible in order to lockdown as much as they possibly can. If you spell out all the specifics of what you actually bring to market, then you've limited yourself to those specifics and somebody else may be able to come up with something close enough to work, but different enough to get around the patent. An overly simplified example: packaging it in doses that are half the size but the patient could just take 2 of.
Frequently those details make a big difference in efficacy, so generics try to copy the exact formulation and even packaging as the branded version in order to be truly interchangeable.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 23 2015, @12:12AM
A patent, at least under the laws of around 1955, was supposed to contain sufficient information that one "skilled in the art" could reproduce the patented invention. That was the basis for the agreement of the state granting a limited (in time, etc.) monopoly to the inventor on the practice of the invention.
Perhaps the laws have changed. But I don't think so.
OTOH, even back as far as 1940 the requirement for revealing the invention was not realistically enforced. So while it's a theoretical requirement, it's not an actual requirement. IIRC people have gotten pattents on FTL spaceship drives, and I'm rather sure that nobody has ever revealed how to make such a thing.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2015, @02:33AM
> A patent, at least under the laws of around 1955, was supposed to contain sufficient information that one "skilled in the art" could reproduce the patented invention.
I don't know if you are playing dumb or what. Drug patents are sufficient to reproduce the raw chemical. They just aren't sufficient to reproduce the specific product delivered to the market. Just like a theoretical patent on the wheel would not need to list the exact number of spokes, nor the the exact diameter of the wheels the WheelCo sells.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 23 2015, @08:41AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 23 2015, @07:09PM
That's a valid point, but it doesn't invalidate the point I was making. Patents often are not explicit. They are intentionally written to be a vague as can be gotten away with partially so that the claims can be as wide as possible. It's not clear that the intention is really to prevent others from being able to copy the work ... most of the time. As you point out, that is more properly addressed by a trade secret. But since they want to be as vague as possible anyway, the holders certainly don't hesitate to take the additional advantage of making replication unfeasible. This is not supposed to be allowed, but that requirement is rarely enforced, and then only in egregious cases.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.