The students of Sydney Grammar School were looking for a chemistry project, and Shkreli’s antics gave them inspiration to try and synthesize pyrimethamine, the key ingredient of Daraprim, with assistance from a researcher at the University of Sydney. The end product? They calculate the cost of making the drug is $2 per dose.
- @nedavanovac lol how is that showing anyone up? almost any drug can be made at small scale for a low price. glad it makes u feel good tho. — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) December 1, 2016 -
[Why people don't buy generic drugs where available is beyond me.]
Some drugs can be discovered and developed for a few million dollars, while others might need more than a billion. On average, though, the cost has been going up .. https://akshatrathi.com/2014/01/22/why-there-may-be-fewer-truly-new-drugs-hitting-the-market/ . Because of these widely variable but often very high costs, the deciding factor in the price in any given country is often nothing other than what a company can get away with charging.
An extreme example is the cancer drug imatinib. In the US, its cost is $146,000 for a 1-year supply .. http://www.ascopost.com/issues/may-25-2016/the-arrival-of-generic-imatinib-into-the-us-market-an-educational-event/ . In India, it’s only $400. That’s because in the US only Novartis, which owns the patent on the drug, is allowed to sell it. Patents are offered to pharma companies as a way of recouping the development cost of a drug. In India, after Novartis lost a court case, it also lost the patent rights to imatinib in the country. That’s why generic manufacturers, which can make the drug for about $200 for a year’s supply, are able to sell it so cheaply.
Similarly, pyrimethamine, the drug the Sydney Grammar School kids were able to make for $2 per dose, and which Turing sells for up to $750, can be bought in India for as little as $0.10.
Turing was able to charge the premium because it owned the rights to the brand name Daraprim in the US, and was its only manufacturer at the time. Turing had acquired Daraprim from another company, so it wasn’t even trying to recoup development costs—though the company says the revenue is funding its development of other drugs.