Martin Shkreli's Drug Price Raise Confirmed? Details Released!
Founder of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli is under fire again after news broke of the 32-year old's plan to sharply increase the price of a decades-old drug, according to CNBC.
The co-founder of hedge fund MSMB Capital Management LLC jacked up a cost of an old drug treatment used by patients with AIDS from $13.50 to $750 in September, right after acquiring rights to the drug.
Organizations that supply the drugs for neglected diseases are upset.
The drug mentioned treats Chagas disease, which is a parasitic infection that may cause potential lethal heart problems. This disease affects six to seven million people, and many of them are poor, revealed Gawker.
"It's caused a lot of angst in the Chagas community," said Dr. Sheba Meymandi, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of a Chagas treatment center at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center. "Everyone's in an uproar."
Shkreli said he wants to take advantage of a federal program that awards vouchers that can be sold to other companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Martin Shkreli wants to have the vouchers by getting the Chagas drug approved by the Food And Drug Administration. By awarding the voucher and not for developing a new drug but just for obtaining the approval, may lead to another case of the system being abused, according to critics.
"I definitely am not doing this for the voucher," said Shkreli to IBT during a one of his routine live streaming sessions. "The drug's not approved in the US, so that's the concept, (but) I would sell the voucher, yeah."
Martin Shkreli mentioned at a conference call last week that if he wins drug's FDA approval, he will set the drug price at as much as $100,000. That drug is currently available elsewhere in the world for $50 per treatment.
Benznidazole is available only from the federal Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. The CDC offers the treatment for free through an experimental program.
