The committee received more than 250,000 pages of documents turned over by Turing and more than 74,000 pages from Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a second company that appears to have built its business model around significant price increases of drugs that it did not invent.
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Martin Shkreli is the former chief executive of the Turing Pharmaceuticals and KaloBios Pharmaceuticals Inc., and he cuts a controversial figure.
Documents from Valeant and Turing show they have made a practice of buying and then dramatically raising prices for low-cost drugs given to patients with life-threatening conditions such as heart disease, AIDS and cancer.
Shkreli said hiking the price of the drug, which is used to treat toxoplasmosis in people with HIV/Aids, cancer and other patients with compromised immune systems, would bring in an extra sales of $375m, “almost all of it profits”.
The House committee will hold a hearing on the topic on Thursday. After he bought the rights for a reported $55 million and increased the price, it caused a strain not only on the patients but on the hospitals as well.
Valeant said in a statement provided to Bloomberg BNA Feb. 2 that before it purchased Nitropress and Isuprel, “it commissioned outside consultants to review the drug’s pricing”.
Documents show how executives at both companies planned to maximize profits while fending off negative publicity.
Turing has taken new steps to ensure affordable access to Daraprim “for every single patient who needs the drug, regardless of ability to pay”, Retzlaff said. In response to objections to the price increase, Shkreli didn’t “decrease the price of Daraprim as he promised, but employed a public relations strategy used by other drug companies to distract public attention away from price increases and focus instead on patient assistance programs and research and development efforts”. We raised the price from $1,700 per bottle to $75,000….
Shkreli, who will appear in a NY court on Wednesday charged with running a Ponzi scheme, announced on Tuesday that he has hired Ben Brafman, one of New York’s best known lawyers whose clients have include Jay-Z, Michael Jackson, Mafia boss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano and former International Monetary Fund boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Medical organizations have estimated that this predatory move could increase the average cost per year for an adult patient reliant on the drug to more than $630,000.
“Should be a very handsome investment for all of us”, Shkreli wrote.
The internal documents provided by Turing provide a window into the operations of the company, showing that the skyrocketing drug price was part of the plan from the beginning. The memo said the drugmaker also more than tripled the prices on over 20 additional US products in 2014 and 2015.
Valeant likewise identified revenue goals first and then used drug prices to reach them, committee staff said in a memo.
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Valeant said that under its recent partnership with Walgreens, it will be offering 10 percent price reductions on some of its most popular drugs and up to 95 percent reductions for a large number of its branded drugs.
