Bad news: if you were still hoping to get one of the $400 juicers from Juicero, you may be out of luck. Juicero announced that they were suspending sales while they seek an acquirer. They'd already dropped the juicer's price from its initial $700 earlier this year and had hoped to find ways to drop it further, but ran out of time. I keep thinking: if they'd been a health care company, they not only might still be in business but also would probably be looking to raise their prices. Juicero once was the darling of investors. It raised $120 million from a variety of respected funding sources, including Kleiner Perkins, Alphabet and Campbell Soup. They weren't a juice company, or even an appliance company. They were a technology company! They had an Internet-of-Things product! They had an ongoing base of customers...
Martin Shkreli
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A DIY Pharmaceutical Revolution Is Coming—If It Doesn’t Kill Us First
As Mixael Laufer tells it, the vision came to him in El Salvador. Laufer was visiting Central America as a human rights envoy, touring a tiny, rural mountain town with the Marin County Peace and Justice Coalition. When he arrived at the town’s medical clinic, it had just run out of birth control. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a country where there are there are methamphetamine and ecstasy labs everywhere. Birth control isn’t that much more complicated,’” Laufer told Gizmodo. “‘Why aren’t these people just making their own birth control?’”...
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A Law Professor’s Big Idea for Combating Greedy Drug Company Titans Like Martin Shkreli
In 2015, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals Martin Shkreli infamously raised the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim by 5,000%. Daraprim, developed more than 60 years ago, is used to treat the deadly parasitic infection toxoplasmosis. It was selling for $13.50 a pill; then Turing raised the price to $750. The move sparked massive backlash and Congressional hearings, and Shkreli himself was eventually arrested for, and convicted of, unrelated securities fraud charges. But the original, horrible problem didn’t get fixed. Turing kept the price sky-high; as of August 2016, many patients were paying $375 per pill...
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Australian High School Students Use Open Source to Make Shkreli's $750 Drug For Less Than $2
Sydney Grammar students, under the supervision of the University of Sydney and global members of the Open Source Malaria consortium, have reproduced an essential medicine in their high school laboratories. The drug, Daraprim, had been the subject of controversy when the price was hiked from US$13.50 to US$750 a dose last year. Daraprim - originally used as an antimalarial after its synthesis by Nobel Prize winner Gertrude Elion - is now more widely used as an anti-parasitic treatment for toxoplasmosis, which can be a dangerous disease for pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems, such as those living with HIV or AIDS...
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Australian Students Recreate Martin Shkreli Price-Hike Drug in School lab
A group of Australian high school students have managed to recreate a life-saving drug that rose from US$13.50 to US$750 a tablet overnight after an unscrupulous price-hike by former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli. The Sydney Grammar students reproduced the drug, Daraprim, used to treat a rare but deadly parasitic infection, in their high school laboratory with support from the University of Sydney and global members of the Open Source Malaria consortium...
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Breaking Good: School Students Make Costly Drug Cheaply Using Open Source Approach
Sydney Grammar students, under the supervision of the University of Sydney and global members of the Open Source Malaria consortium, have reproduced an essential medicine in their high school laboratories. The drug, Daraprim, had been the subject of controversy when the price was hiked from US $13.50 to US$750 a dose last year. Daraprim - originally used as an antimalarial after its synthesis by Nobel Prize winner Gertrude Elion - is now more widely used as an anti-parasitic treatment for toxoplasmosis, which can be a dangerous disease for pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems, such as those living with HIV or AIDS...
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EpiPen Delivers Epinephrine and Healthcare Insight: Price Gouging and Medical Extortion
The header image is a chart that was part of an article by Bloomberg — written over two years ago (May, 2014). The data itself goes back 9 years. Mylan's price gouging was front and center this week, but the issue has been actively percolating for years. It has also erupted before and it will again. Everyone's squawking and legislators are "looking into it," but it won't be solved this year — or even this election cycle. Here's why...
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Epipen: A Sign of a Broken Healthcare System
It has been going on for years. The difference is that now the media is hopping on the story. Now America is paying attention. In 2015, the price of doxycycline, a generic antibiotic, was up to $5 per pill, an increase from $0.03 in 2014. The antibiotic is the gold standard treatment for Lyme disease. In 2015, the price of Daraprim (pyrimethamine), was up to $750 per pill, an increase from $13.50. The antiparasitic medication is used to toxoplasmosis, an infection acquired in people who have HIV/AIDS...
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Health Care's Juicero Problem
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Is Shkreli the Exception, or the Norm, in Big Pharma?
I didn't want to write about pharmaceutical companies. They get enough bad press, and adding to it almost seems like piling on. If Valeant is the poster company for outrage about drug pricing, it's less because what they are doing is unusual than it is because we suspect they are the norm. Honestly, I wanted to discuss McDonald's turning their Happy Meals boxes into VR headsets --I'm not making that up -- but, gosh darn it, it's almost like the pharmaceutical companies are daring me to talk about them. So I will.
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Martin Shkreli Congratulates Australian Students for Recreating Life-Saving Drug
Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has congratulated a group of Australian students who reproduced the active ingredient for a life-saving, anti-parasitic drug at the centre of a drug-price controversy involving his former company. The students from Sydney Grammar School drew global media attention this week after they said they had produced the drug Daraprim for about $2 a dose, a fraction of the current list price of $750 per dose. Shkreli is a former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, where he sparked outrage among patients and U.S. lawmakers for raising the price of Daraprim by more than 5,000%...
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Mylan Isn't Alone: 11 Drugmakers with Off-the-Charts Pricing Power
Mylan (MYL) is drawing fire for passing off massive price hikes for its EpiPen allergy treatment. But it’s far from being the drug company with the most pricing power. Gilead (GILD), Biogen (BIIB) and Amgen (AMGN), along with eight other drug giants in the Standard & Poor's 500, enjoyed off-the-charts pricing power on their products relative to costs — far beyond Mylan's, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from S&P Global Market Intelligence...
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Open Source Malaria Helps Students with Proof of Concept Toxoplasmosis Pill
A team of Australian student researchers at Sydney Grammar School has managed to recreate the formula for Daraprim, the drug made (in)famous by the actions of Turing Pharmaceuticals last year when it increased the price substantially per pill. According to Futurism, the undertaking was helped along by an, “online research-sharing platform called Open Source Malaria [OSM], which aims to use publicly available drugs and medical techniques to treat malaria”...
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The $100,000-Per-Year Pill: How US Health Agencies Choose Pharma Over Patients
Don Reichmuth survived prostate cancer once before, back in 2007, so his physician was concerned when tests recently revealed the cancer had returned. Reichmuth's physician prescribed a drug called enzalutamide, marketed by the Japanese company Astellas Pharma, Inc. under the brand name Xtandi. But when the physician sent the prescription to the pharmacy, the managers of Reichmuth's insurance plan sent back an immediate refusal to approve it. Reichmuth, a retired teacher who lives in Washington State, was puzzled by the logic. Then he learned the price of the Xtandi prescription: over $9,700 each month...
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