14 DAY TRIAL // It was back in August that US company Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the marketing rights to Daraprim, a drug used to treat a rare infectious disease called toxoplasmosis.
Then, over night, the company bumped the cost of the drug from $13.50 (€12) to $750 (€674), an over 5,000% increase. Doctors protested the move, as did patients, and so Turing Pharmaceuticals is now neck-deep in hot water.
All the same, the company stands by its decision
These past couple of days, Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli has been on a tour of television studios. His goal: make people come to their sense and accept the price bump.
Martin Shkreli says the reason Turing Pharmaceuticals increased the price of Daraprim is that they need to turn a profit on it. Apparently, the companies before them were pretty much giving it away.
“We needed to turn a profit on this drug. The companies before us were actually giving it away almost,” the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals told Bloomberg TV in an interview.
Make no mistake, Turing Pharmaceuticals cares deeply about the wellbeing of toxoplasmosis patients. In fact, seeing that they have affordable access to Daraprim is their chief concern.
“We are committed to ensuring easy and affordable access to this important treatment,” the company writes in a statement. “Toxoplasmosis is a very serious, sometimes deadly disease,” it adds. It's just that, at the end of the day, business is business and money is money, it forgot to add.
Interestingly, Turning Pharmaceuticals says that, apart from wanting to turn a profit on Daraprim, one of the reasons it upped its cost more than 5,000% over is that it plans to spend some of the extra money on developing new and more effective drugs for toxoplasmosis.
Just for the record, the cost of making one Daraprim pill is about $1 (€0.9). Martin Shkreli says the price increase isn't due to manufacturing costs but has more to do with marketing and other administrative expenses.
People are having trouble believing Martin Shkreli
The price hike might make sense to Martin Shkreli and its peers over at Turing Pharmaceuticals, but people sure aren't happy about it.
There are now several online petitions asking that law makers and high officials take measures against the company and compel it to go back on its decision to up the cost of Daraprim.
Even the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association, together with other health care groups, have written an open letter to Turing Pharmaceuticals asking that they reconsider.
As noted, toxoplasmosis is an infectious disease. The condition is caused by a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii and is especially dangerous to people with a compromised immune system, like cancer and AIDS patients.
