Pharmaceuticals CEO who raised HIV drug price by 5,000% ‘also hiked cost of pill taken by children with incurable kidney disease’
During Mr Shkreli's tenure at another firm, the price of cystinuria drug Thiola was reportedly increased by almost 2,000%
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Tags: 000%, Drug, HIV drug, HIV drug price by 5, Martin Shkreli, Pharmaceuticals CEO
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The pharmaceuticals CEO that raised the cost of a drug used by Aids sufferers by more than 5,000 per cent also hiked the price of medication taken by children for a rare kidney disease, it has emerged.
Martin Shkreli is currently the chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, which has been internationally condemned for its use of Daraprim, which is the only US-approved treatment for toxoplasmosis.
After obtaining the rights to sell the drug in August, Turing increased the price from $13.50 (£9) per pill to $750 (£490) overnight in a move that Hillary Clinton called “outrageous”.
Mr Shkreli told ABC News that his company would reduce the cost of Daraprim to make it more accessible on Monday, although he did not say what the new price for the drug would be.
“We’ve agreed to lower the price of Daraprim to a point that is more affordable and is able to allow the company to make a profit, but a very small profit,” he said.
Turing had said it would use profits to improve the drug’s formulation and develop new, better drugs for the toxoplasmosis. Daraprim treats patients with compromised immune systems caused by HIV and other conditions.
But attention is now being drawn to Mr Shkreli’s pricing decisions at his previous pharmaceutical company, Retrophin.
During his time at the firm from 2011 to his resignation in October last year, it acquired the rights to sell Thiola, which is used to treat cystinuria.
Sufferers may take the drug for life, starting in early childhood, in an effort to manage the rare and incurable disease that afflicts about 20,000 patients in the United States.
It causes sufferers’ bodies to constantly create kidney stones, causing excruciating pain, severe organ damage and in some cases, death.
Thiola was approved to treat cystinuria by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1988 and was acquired by Retrophin in May 2014.
Some patients must take between five to 10 of the tablets every day.
Benjamin Davies, the Assistant Professor of Urology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, wrote for The Street in September 2014 that the firm increased the price from $1.50 (£1) per pill to more than $30 (£20) for the same product – an increase of almost 2,000 per cent.
“As a physician, treating cystinuria patients is extremely difficult,” he wrote. “You can remove a kidney stone one day only to have the patient show up the next month with more kidney stones. Cystinuria patients are some of the bravest you will ever meet.”
Reuters reported that shares of Retrophin Inc jumped as much as 31 per cent following the deal allowing it to market Thiola.
The company’s website describes it as “focused on the development, acquisition and commercialisation of drugs for the treatment of serious, catastrophic or rare diseases for which there are currently no viable options for patients,” before listing Thiola as one of its main products.
“As the only supplier of the drug to the US, Retrophin has increased the price for the drug just because it can,” pharmaceutical finance expert Steve Brozak wrote in Forbes in September 2014.
“Even though it’s a generic drug that any company with development capability could bring to market, there are no alternatives for Thiola on the market…Retrophin (is) turning patients into commodities like barrels of oil.”
Additional reporting by AP and Reuters
I have taken Donatal (belladonna) for years. It used to cost me $2.30 USD for 90 pills. Then suddenly it cost over $1000 USD for 90. That is the amount I pay after insurance.
The system is utterly failing.
This is what happens when you allow the health of your nation to be dictated by businesspeople.
Idk why, but I feel like human life shouldn’t be a commodity.
Holy hell, I’d shamelessly do my best to import from Canada, India, or anywhere but the US. If the government arrests you, raise holy hell and get yourself plastered across as many news channels as possible. “I’m arrested for being unwilling to pay a monopoly’s 5000% markup on a pill that I can no longer comfortably afford.” Nothing has angered me like this in a long time.
I would make a joke here about how I’m enjoying watching this shitshow from my country with universal healthcare and laws against this sort of thing… but considering the enormous number of innocent people being screwed over, I’m just horrified you guys aren’t rioting yet. Seriously, do something about this before it’s too late.
The guy just radiates “prick.”
The Crohn’s medication that my daughter and I take to remain among the living costs almost $1000/month despite being just a new delivery method (time release) for a well known compound. It works far better, but $1000 per month not to die?
I’m glad this guy’s bullshit is being called out, but people need to wake up to the fact that healthcare in the US is systemically broken. These aren’t that isolated.
I should mention that this is our cost after insurance.
As an 18 year old college student making longterm plans around my girlfriend (who’s got crohns), this terrifies me
My honest, bared-to-the-bone, no-frills sincere advice? Find out if it’s realistic for the two of you to establish citizenship and participate in national benefits in a more compassionate place than the US.
I’m not even remotely kidding. Medical bills have made my life an order of magnitude harder than it ever should have been. The stress from bills alone (and the harrassing phone calls when I was 18 and had no experience dealing with them, no internet to get advice on, either) made me almost as sick as my disease did. Never mind the financial consequences and all of the life/milestone delays that have come with them.
In all seriousness, if you can get to a better place, GO.
Something tells me his board is going to drop him. Hopefully they remove his Golden Parachute first.
I’m glad there’s a safe option for treating Hemophilia, but man, if people lost their shit over the price hike over Daraprim, they should look at how much hemophiliacs have to pay for something like Advate. The cost of one treatment for an adult is a few thousand dollars. And that doesn’t even cure the disease. God help you if you have severe hemophiia where they get injection multiple times a week for the rest of their lives.
God damn, this is like some evil movie villain shit.
This guy is absolutely vile. His flippant attitude he displayed with his Tweets on the subject is the stuff of a complete sociopath. I’m hoping karma will catch up to this asshole!
Morally bankrupt. Not a shred of decency. Couldn’t possibly care less about anything but profits. It gives me chills.
You can’t price pharmaceuticals based on market demand. Market demand will naturally set an appropriate price for an iPhone, but what is the demand for a product you need to survive. You can set the cost a pill in the thousands of dollars and people will bankrupt themselves to purchase them as it is necessary for their health.
The US really needs to deprivatize their healthcare system.
Obamacare really didn’t address this at all. Life shouldn’t have a for-profit system.
I’d rather pay higher tax than pay these insurance companies plus the doctors and THEN be denied medicine with just “THIS IS NOT COVERED SO SORRY”.
I am and have always been against insurance. The very basis of it is faulty. I require a doctor once every 4-5 years and then I don’t expect to run around between the pharmacy and doctors to make sure I’m prescribed what my insurance covers AND pay up huge amounts out of pocket. While some other chronically sick person is on the same insurance as mine, getting treament 10x I need and costing 1000x my one doctor’s visit costs and paying up the same deductible. Harsh as I may sound, I’d rather give more money to the government rather than leave it upto private companies to decide how best to steal my money and play robinhood.
A call to the hackers out there: instead of messing with PSN and XBOX Live can you do something useful….like deal with this tool?
Thanks!
Do you put your actually name or mailing address or do you like have a burner mailbox? With a different name. Legitimate questions on the specifics… not that I want to do this or anything. Just curious.
I had to do some research on various dark net markets/online pharmacies for some work I did with the FDA a while back, and this is what I found out:
The biggest concern with ordering from these places, especially if the drugs are illegal in the US without a prescription, is that they’ll be seized by law enforcement/customs, traced back to you (the buyer), and then you’d be made the target of a CD (Controlled Delivery, basically where law enforcement executes a sting operation by delivering your package to you and trying to get confirmation that you know that the package contains illegal materials). Here’s a bit more info on CD’s.
With that risk in mind, it’s generally recommended to use your legitimate name and address for deliveries like this, especially if you’re not buying up pills or drugs in bulk (like thousands of pills or pounds of weed or coke or whatever). If using a regular address though, it’s advised that you buy domestically, as trying to sneak illegal packages through customs can be dangerous. For domestic shipments, the likelihood of a small parcel being intercepted is relatively low, especially if it’s shipped next day or 2nd day mail, as those give law enforcement very little time to set up a CD if it actually is intercepted.
Now, there is the option of setting up a drop (or in your words, a burner mailbox), but there can be a decent amount of effort involved. Some people that I’ve found online will choose a house that’s for sale, some people will have a friend open a PO box in the friends name, some people try to have mail delivered to an empty lot and intercept the mailman on the day of delivery. These are really only useful if buying in bulk (or just trying to be extra extra extra careful), and if set up properly can be very effective.
Once the drop is set up, the buyer has to go through a few steps to make sure that the box/address doesn’t arouse suspicion. If the drop location is a house or an apartment, they have to make sure that the property looks lived in and not abandoned (both to make sure the regular mailman doesn’t get suspicious and to make sure any neighbors think someone lives there). Next, they have to make sure the address is receiving mail semi-regularly (including packages) from various parts of the country/world. Basically, if there’s a mailbox opened up that only receives mail from one sender on a semi regular basis, it becomes a pretty obvious target for investigation. If a cursory investigation reveals that the neighbors and postman both say that it seems like no one lives in the location, all of a sudden that drop is under full investigation.
All of the above is why most dealers/sellers recommend using your regular address and name for shipments of small quantities of illegal materials shipped domestically – your mailbox/address already receives mail regularly from various places, and the small packages you’d be receiving would be pretty unlikely to be under suspicion, especially if it’s well packaged.
Hopefully that answers your question!
I wish the media would stop calling it an HIV/AIDS drug. It’s for toxoplasmosis. People with HIV/AIDS need several treatments for several things, but this is not a drug that helps treat HIV/AIDS itself.
I’m not saying it makes any less reprehensible, but the distortion of fact to make it sound even worse is just a click baiting opportunity by the media.
The price of one daraprim pill in the Netherlands is 21 cents. It’s regulated by the government, not subsidized. In India it’s roughly 5 cents. Capitalism gone nuts..
He’s short selling. He’s not raising the drug to make a quick profit off the increased price (although I’m sure he’s benefiting from it) he’s doing it to get bad press, drop the biotech index, invest heavy, reverse what he did, then sell.
Dude is making a fuckload of cash off this. It’s what he does.
“yes more affordable price of $500 a pill, hey we lowered the price by $250!!! what more do you want! at this price we are not making any profit, we are even losing money!” – Martin “douchebag” Shkreli
Where’s V when you need him?
Do you have any idea how many people V would have to kill to fix our broken medical system?
Every single politician and every single person on every single board of every health insurance and pharmaceutical company in America. And it couldn’t be one at a time, either, they’d replace themselves with promising up-and-coming junior executive douchbags much to quickly. He’d need to commit some sort of executive mass murder to even get the point across. And he’d probably have to do it again 3 months later before the message finally hit home. We’re talking tens of thousands of people. It’s just an inconceivably huge amount of killing.
How does he rationalize that? “Meh, the disease is incurable anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter if they can’t afford to take the medicine.”
The wealthy see people as suckers to be taken. This is another example of how human lives and misery are just part of a financial equation. People die and suffer. So what. I make billions. That is all that matters.
You guys keep demonizing the guy, and yes I’m sure he is a despicable human being. But the real problem isn’t this guy (who I am sure there are millions more of albeit less blatantly obvious super villians) the problem remains in the system that allows people like him to exist. The problem lies in the American privatized healthcare system. This guy is no different than that asshole cop who pulled you over for going 5 over. It’s his job to pull you over and it’s this guys job to make money for his company. The problem is the system and it always will be.
Ethics is meaningless in capitalism.
Honestly, where is the anti-trust regulation?
When a company is the sole manufacturer of a critical drug, why do our monopoly regulations not kick in?
We will go after Microsoft because users are too stupid to install a non-IE web browser, but we won’t fine these companies or break them up when they overcharge for drugs purely because of a monopoly on manufacturing approval?
And this has nothing to do with patent exclusivity. This guy is purposely looking for drugs no longer under patent that simply have one approved manufacturer with no other competitors in a position to undercut any price increase.
It is flat out price gouging by a monopoly. That is his entire business model, monopolize US supply, then price gouge.
Blame congress for not implementing price ceilings on big pharma. Can we really blame a company who is working within the law when it’s the lawmakers who allow such price hikes to happen? It’s like getting mad at BP for the deep water horizon when they were operating within the established regulations of off-shore oil rigs. Sure, they failed to accurately report safety issues but what can we expect when we allow BP to perform its own safety checks? It could have been any company that had an oil rig fail. Our government failed to regulate another lucrative industry, shocker!
To me it sounds like this CEO is a true American cashing in on the American Dream. We worship successful businessmen, why should this person be any different?