“We are pleased to partner with Express Scripts to take positive action to counterbalance companies like Turing and others in order to address the growing drug pricing crisis in America”, he said.
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That compares with a price of $750 per pill for the drug provided by Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company that acquired Daraprim earlier this year and dramatically raised its price from $13.50 a tablet to $750. He offered to provide hospitals with Daraprim at up to 50% discount and healthcare providers with free samples and smaller bottles that can be less costly to stock.
Last month, at HRC’s urging, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman began investigating whether Turing Pharmaceuticals may have violated antitrust laws by limiting distribution of a drug that is essential to the lives of medically vulnerable people. The pharmacy will be further working alongside organizations like the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA), to create awareness for Daraprim’s alternative among doctors.
Express Scripts, the largest pharmacy benefits manager in the US, will cover a $1 treatment designed as an alternative to a $750 pill that helps patients ward off a potentially deadly parasitic disease.
Express Scripts added Imprimis to its network of pharmacies and gave the compounded drug a reimbursement code. Last week, Turing said it would not cut the retail list price of the drug, after saying it would do so after a public uproar two months ago.
It’s a bit ironic for Express Scripts to support compounding pharmacies and this particular FDA loophole. The company that tried to reap off some of the sickest patient groups in the country by unjustifiably hiking price of a decades-old drug is essentially being pushed out of the drug’s market – and it all started with a single tweet.
Turing is offering “patient assistance programs” to low-income people that can limit their costs to $10 copayments, she said.
“Leveraging our expertise to improve access and affordability to an important medication is the right thing to do for HIV patients and others who could benefit from a combination of pyrimethamine and leucovorin”, Express Scripts SVP and chief medical officer Dr. Steve Miller said. Express Scripts says only a few hundred of its customers were treated a year ago for the infection, but the company is always looking to remove wasteful spending from the health care system.
Imprimis combines pyrimethamine, the chemical name for the active ingredient in Daraprim, with a form of folic acid called leucovorin. However, as explained by Imprimis, the formulation may “be prescribed pursuant to a physician prescription for an individually identified patient” if the prescribed treatment is “consistent with federal and state laws governing compounded drug formulations”.
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Although both are approved by the The Food and Drug Administration, their use as a compounded drug formulation is not.
