NEW YORK, Sep 22 2015 – The head of a US drugs company has defended his company’s decision to raise the price of medication used by Aids patients by over 5,000 percent.
Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the rights to Daraprim in August, raising the price of a dose from $13.50 to $750.
CEO Martin Shkreli said the company was “charging the right price that the markets and prior owners missed” and that they will use the money from sales to research new treatments.
Daraprim was developed in 1953 as a treatment for toxoplasmosis, an infection caused by a parasite. It comes from eating under-cooked meat or drinking contaminated water, and affects those with compromised immune systems, like AIDS and cancer patients.
When Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price of Daraprim to $750 per tablet, the average cost of treatment for patients rose from about $1,130 to $63,000. For certain patients, the cost can go as high as $634,000.
While Shkreli acknowledged that the move might look “greedy,” he said there are “a lot of altruistic properties to it.”
“This is a disease where there hasn’t been one pharmaceutical company focused on it for 70 years. We’re now a company that is dedicated to the treatment and cure of toxoplasmosis. And with these new profits we can spend all of that upside on these patients who sorely need a new drug, in my opinion,” he added.
The topic entered the political debate on Monday, with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeting: “Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous.”
Her rival Bernie Sanders sent a letter to Shkreli demanding information on the price increase and called the rate hike “…the latest in a long list of skyrocketing price increases for certain critical medications.”
