A huge price increase to a 62-year old drug from $13.50 per tablet to $750 in just an overnight has resulted to questions and protests from specialists and doctors. The drug, Daraprim, has become a standard care to treat life-threatening parasitic infection for a long time.
Daraprim was recently acquired by a start-up company, Turin Pharmaceuticals which is run by a former hedge fund manager. Upon acquisition, the medicine price was raised more than ten-fold overnight making it difficult to continue the treatment because of the price increase. The annual cost of treatment could jump to thousands of dollars annually said reports from New York Times.
The increase in cost has been met with a lot of speculations and protests. Dr. Judith Aberg, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine in Mt. Sinai said, "What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?" She also added that this move can force hospitals to use "alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy."
There has been a growing concern about price hikes of older drugs turning them into "specialty drugs". While some increase in prices is caused by shortage, some are strategies used by businesses to turn old mainstays drugs to high priced specialty drugs. Daraprim has a generic name pyrimethamine and is used generally to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasite infection that can cause serious problems for babies born from infected women during pregnancy. Left untreated, this could be life threatening especially to AIDS and certain cancer patients. Daraprim is also used to treat malaria and was approved by FDA in 1953. This was originally manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline.
Earlier this month, the Infectious Disease Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association sent a joint letter to Turing stating that the price hike is "unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population" and "unsustainable for the health care system."
Martin Shkreli, founder and the chief executive of Turing, said that the drug is rarely used, the effect to health care system will be minimal. A better treatment with fewer side effects for toxoplasmosis will be developed with the money earned. "This is still one of the smallest pharmaceutical products in the world," he said. "It really doesn't make sense to get any criticism for this."
