Big Price Increase for Tuberculosis Drug Is Rescinded

[lxe]

This is NOT the currently viral Turing Pharmaceuticals's hike of Daraprim's price (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-...) that's being rescinded. I had no idea that this practice of buying up patents and increasing drug prices is so common. Sounds like the pharmaceuticals market is full of some very unethical folks.

[austenallred]

Sounds like handling the PR of buying drug patents and jacking up their price multiple orders of magnitude just became more expensive.

[AC__]

The pharmaceutical industry is just as corrupt as the financial sector. It seems capitalists will be capitalists. A lot of well intentioned companies seem to go this way too. Share holders demand profitable growth, sociopathic execs are brought in and I think the results speak for themselves.

[deelowe]

Having worked in several large corporate environments for most of my lift, sociopaths are the highest achievers of the bunch when it comes to working their way up the corporate ladder.

[jayess]

It would be more accurate to say that people will be people. Greed is not limited to capitalists. Greed, lust for money, and the need for power are observable across all political, social, and governmental systems.

[danharaj]

Abuse of power comes as no surprise.

[manigandham]

What does this have to do with capitalists? Anyone hungry for money/power/wealth/success will do what they do bounded usually by their morals/ethics and the law.

Since we can't just "fix" morals/ethics - what remains is the legal system and regulation.

What's unfortunate is that money can also change the legal system for the worse and remove these protections over time or keep them from ever being put in place. Not sure of solution for that.

[josu]

Capitalists hiding behind patent laws enforced by the states, which isn't really the purest form of capitalism. And usually, there is no such thing as a well intentioned company, once they reach a certain size they become profit maximizers before anything else.

[hughes]

How to be praised for doubling the price of an essential drug:

1. Set the price to 55x the original

2. Wait for outrage

3. Set the price to 2x the original

4. Profit

[gameshot911]

The drug was being produced at a loss. Raising the price so that the manufacturer is able to keep producing it is surely preferable to to no drug at all, right?

[swframe]

Previously, Martin Shkreli shorted drug companies and tried to convince regulators to blocked their pending drugs. I wonder if he is shorting the drug stocks again but this time he is using a new technique to destabilize the market. So the steps would be:

1. Short stocks in a vital niche market

2. Buy an inexpensive producer of an important product, jack up prices to cause outrage and a strong government response

3. Wait for the market to sell off stocks in the niche market

4. Collect the profits from 1.

5. Dump the producer purchased in step 2.

[pkaye]

Note that the 55x price and 2x price are done by different groups.

[aqwwe]

Do you go to 110x first for quadrupling?

[toddbranch]

"Mr. Hasler said this was probably not done because foreign manufacturers were not willing to bear the expense of applying for regulatory approval in the United States to serve a tiny number of patients."

Or we could reduce the burden of applying for approval?

[neurotech1]

There is actually a FDA "waiver" process known as a "Humanitarian Device Exemption" for medical devices.

The FDA does allow compounding pharmacies [0] to produce orphan drugs that are not otherwise available commercially.

The big issue with using compounding pharmacies to produce orphan drugs is that these drugs can't be marketed for a specific use. The approval is as much about how the drug is marketed as the drug itself.

The reason why the case of Daraprim [1] is so outrageous is that the drug is approved and in production, and the increase is profit for the "marketing" drug company.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compounding#Regulation_in_the_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrimethamine

[Scoundreller]

I agree. My blood isn't any different than a Europeans' or an Americans', so why duplicate the approval process? It can't be unsafe for one and safe for another just because some imaginary line has been crossed.

It would also help to reduce drug shortages if stock could be more easily transferred.

[martinflack]

It would be nice for someone to start a non-profit organization supported by donors that would exist purely to purchase rights to these medicines and keep them relatively low-cost to patients.

[thrownaway2424]

Great idea, and we could call it "the government".

[Gustomaximus]

Australia has the 'PBS' system. It largely works in 2 parts; One the medicine is subsidised with a user co-payment. And secondly the government negotiates with companies to be in the PBS program. This way, especially where there are multiple drug choices there is massive negotiation power. They essentially offer access to our entire country or none.

Another effect is this scheme encourages generics so people don't pay for brand names, and if they do they're likely off the PBS list so you would pay full price so the government doesn't have to subsidise the premium.

It's not a perfect system and it's getting more expensive but it works OK in the privitised medicine system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_Benefits_Scheme

[bsimpson]

Based on the article, it sounds like Purdue University's research arm was serving more-or-less this function, but because they were losing money on regulatory costs, they accepted Rodelis's offer to buy the rights. Now, Purdue has the rights again, and is aiming for a more sustainable price.

[kjs3]

It would be nice if such an organization didn't need to exist.

[artursapek]

"Rodelis reveals almost no information about itself, such as the names of its executives, directors or investors, on its web page. It operates out of Alpharetta, Ga., though the Chao Center’s statement said it was based in Dublin."

They sound a lot like a patent troll.

[markvdb]

...with their fiscal headquarters in a tax haven. Dublin? Smells of double Irish and similar fiscal constructions...

[anigbrowl]

As an Irish citizen I once again have to apologize for my erstwhile government's perpetuation of this chicanery. The country is becoming the European equivalent of Delaware.

[avemg]

What a boon this is for Turing. I'm willing to bet most of the public will not realize it's not the same drug from the earlier price hike story.

[jholman]

Although the headline is not referencing Daraprim and Turing Pharmaceuticals, some of the content is about that, and there is an embedded video interviewing Shkreli, the Turing CEO.

I recommend watching it; I thought it was a very good interview. Shkreli makes his case much more effectively than I'd have predicted.

Example: he claims that a treatment course of Daraprim costs less than other drugs that, in his opinion, are comparable (i.e. those other drugs are cures for other similar diseases).

[o_nate]

I'm not a patent lawyer, but I don't understand how 62-year old drugs still require licenses to be manufactured? Seems like another case of patent law gone mad.

[refurb]

You don't understand why there are regulations around manufacturing a selling a prescription drug? Really?

I don't know about you, but I kinda like those regulations.

[hkmurakami]

Rescinding seems smart so as not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg by way of overarching regulatory overhaul.

[strathmeyer]

Is this the CEO who was trolling on Twitter?

[bsimpson]

No.

[mglinski]

And this is not reddit.

[dang]

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10255465 and marked it off-topic.

[ck2]

Only an act of congress could fix this problem, so we are doomed (they have post offices to name before they try to shut them all down).