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Drug Firm Offers $1 Version of $750 Daraprim Pill (chicagotribune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: We recently read about a U.S. company that bought the rights to a drug called Daraprim and then boosted the price over 5,000%. There was widespread outrage over this blatant price gouging, most of it focused on hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli. Now, a San Diego-based drug company called Imprimis has stepped in to fill the void. They announced that they'll be supplying capsules containing the same active ingredients in Daraprim for $1 per dose. Their CEO, Mark Baum, said they'll also start making alternative versions of other generic medicines that have skyrocketed in price lately. "Imprimis, which primarily makes compounded drugs to treat cataracts and urological conditions, will work with health insurers and prescription benefit managers in each state to make its new capsules and other compounded generic medicines widely available, Baum said."
This guy is a multiple-time asshole
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wow So there are drug companies out there who /aren't/ out to gouge every last penny out of the sick, disabled and dying...
My faith in humanity just increased somewhat -.o
Just hope Imprimis can actually afford to supply everyone at that rate, they're probably taking a loss doing that.
a good, healthy profit by helping those who are ill, but not an outrageous one on the back of gouging the sick.
But this whole story just seems... odd. Just to rehash it - a billionaire deuce canoe "with much evil" buys a company and hikes a drug price, and goes on TV to brag about it. Anyone not mentally retarded knows what happens here, it generates such outcry against the canoe captain that he gets 24x7 news coverage for a few weeks. Nobody is naive enough to think they would be immune to backlash here. Before the price hike can have any real long-term impact, angel company #2 comes out and says they'll supply our little angels with this miracle for $1, because think of the children.
Does anyone not find this odd? I mean, I don't know what the world has done to me, but it sounds like a setup from the very beginning. Either a bid to kill off the original company, to drive up stock in angel company #2, or some other motive that I just can't fathom.
I don't have a chronic or terminal disease, but if I had money lying around I'd invest it in this guy's company, just to encourge them to continue being one of the few anti-assholes of the world. More power to 'em.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"they'll be supplying capsules containing the same active ingredients in Daraprim for $1 per dose."
But you need 750 doses per day. Dammit Big Pharma, I think I'm out and you pull me back in.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
I wonder though... at a dollar a pill... when you compare it to 750, it seems insanely tiny. But look at your bottle of ibuprofin, at $13 for 1,000 capsules, you see that even at a buck a pill they are still easily able to stay in the black.
I realize not every pill has the same manufacturing cost, but they are at least within an order of magnutude of each other for the most part. At a buck a pill, that bottle above would be $1,000. It's $13, and they're still making a margin off it. I'd be surprised if this $750 drug costs over 76 times as much to manufacture in quantity as another drug.
They're trying to recoup an R&D lost. I get that. That's OK. But they've had years to do that. That's precisely why we have patents. But when your time is up, that knowledge is transferred to the public. It's up to you as a developer to use your time wisely and recoup your investment and reap a reward for your innovation. But then you have to give it up. If you still don't feel you've managed to get enough back out of the system by that point, then you're doing something wrong, and have no one to blame but yourself.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The two drug combo tablet, Pyrimethamine 25mg + Sulfadoxine 500mg, has many generic suppliers in India, for under 4 cents a tablet, with a lot more sulfa drug added in. The aseptic pilling and blister packaging probably cost more than the pyrimethamine at 1 cent.
$13.50 per tablet of 25 mg pyrimethamine was a joke and an utter ripoff. The $750 makes the French Revolution more understandable when they started shortening corrupt financiers and government royalists after a short trial...Sort of a closer shave with that super sized Gillete thing.
No he's not, LEARN TO READ ffs.
When Chevy says that they're truck
He's saying that you shouldn't believe someone who says they are a truck. They are LYING to you, they are actually just a person in a truck outfit.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
He got the U.S. marketing rights to that formulation. To the best of my knowledge, before Imprimis started making their DIFFERENT formulation, there wasn't a generic.
The plan (or part of it) was that anyone who needed the drug in the U.S. would only be able to get it through specific vendors who got it from Shkreli's company. There were significant barriers in place to keep companies who might make generics of the same formulation from getting enough of that formulation to reverse engineer it.
However, the particular active ingredient can be used in other formulations which aren't covered by the rights that Shkreli's company has. Specifically, there is a loophole that allows Imprimis to do what it just did - make a different formulation.
Now, they (Imprimis) can still only make this stuff on request. They can't mass produce the drug, supply it to pharmacies and thereby fully extend the giant middle finger to Shkreli. However, they are able to produce it on a "per request" basis for individual customers.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Part of the problem here is that the FDA requires generics do need to undergo testing similar to the original product (instead of merely proving that the ingredients in the generic are the same as in the original product), which can take years and millions of dollars. These FDA requirements make generics expensive to produce -- meaning that generic versions of many drugs do not exist. Without the FDA requirements, the market would take care of ridiculous price bumps by bringing in competitors.
Now, I just claimed that the FDA makes it hard to bring generics to the market, so how did a competitor spring up so quickly in this case? The answer is that the new manufacture seriously bent FDA rules: the product mentioned in the description is _not_ FDA approved. The company making the product is not a standard drug manufacturer; it is a "compounding pharmacy" -- meaning that it can skirt FDA rules by making batches of drugs for one individual at a time (not making huge batches and selling them to Wallgreen's, CVS, etc.) Since this drug is not widely used, this approach may work. However, the FDA regulations are still a burden in general (and the FDA still has some power to put the kibosh on compounding pharmacy).
See http://marginalrevolution.com/... for more information
You're assuming no other regulation that patent, It's rather expensive to bring a new generic online. The FDA is slow to do the paperwork their are increased costs etc etc etc. It's so bad that a basic drug like tetracycline the only generic was made by the brand name for a while and the price went from pennies to dollars per pill overnight. The 2012 Generic Drug User Fee Amendments was supposed to make generics come online faster but has ended up shrinking the number of providers and the price hikes to go with them.
No sir I dont like it.
Instead of having a centrally planned monopoly and trying to determine a "sufficient" budget, I would much rather have competing companies that have to raise funds by convincing skeptical investors, and then have to generate profits by pleasing their customers.
How does that differ from the pre-FDA situation? It would seem problems with that model is exactly why the FDA was created in the first place.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The thing is, there are no rights on the drug, the patent expired, there just aren't any other makers for it because the market is so small. You can make this drug at home with a relatively basic chem set, you can get it from the UK or Canada, the only people paying the multi-thousand dollar fee are the insurance companies.
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