Once Shkreli got his hands on the pill, its price soared from $13.50 to $750 overnight, immediately turning him into a public enemy. “$1bn here we come”, he wrote to the board chairman of his drug company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, before the transaction.
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August 27, 2015, Shkreli emails an outside contact about anticipated profits from Daraprim price hike: “I think it will be huge….So 5,000 paying bottles at the new price is $375,000,000-almost all of it is profit and I think we will get 3 years of that or more”.
“Should be a very handsome investment for all of us”, he said.
Martin Shkreli, the former hedge fund manager under fire for buying a pharmaceutical company and ratcheting up the price of a life-saving drug, sits in an awaiting vehicle after being taken into custody following a securities probe, on Thursday, Dec. 17, 2015 in NY.
The company would help with co-payments and would take other measures to ensure all patients who need the drug receive it. He said the money from the new price would be used for research on new drugs.
“While, like most other pharmaceutical companies, we will from time to time raise prices, I expect those prices increases to be within industry norms and much more modest than the ones that drew this Committee’s legitimate concern”, Shiller said in his prepared remarks.
Shkreli’s Turing Pharmaceuticals may represent an egregious example of what has become a norm in the drug industry: pharmaceutical manufacturers pushing across significant price increases without any changes to the medication.
Regarding Valeant, the Democratic staff memo says the company identified revenue goals for Isuprel and Nitropress and raised the prices to reach those goals.
He also wrote that patients were best served when prices reflected the market: “When these drugs are priced to reflect more closely their true clinical value, the more accurate price signals incentivize generic competition and innovation”.
When asked about the congressional report, Valeant said it expected that its future growth will be driven more by sales volume than pricing.
The 32-year-old Shkeli has been subpoenaed by a congressional committee investigating the price of drugs.
And like Turing, Valeant adopted a patient-assistance program that was used to “minimize media coverage of the pricing increase”, and assuage payers.
Valeant said in a statement Tuesday that it was now offering discounts of up to 30 percent to hospitals on Isuprel and Nitropress.
Shkreli cited the Fifth Amendment, which protects against the abuse of government authority in legal proceedings to avoid self-incrimination, and he refuses to answer questions.
A new lawyer in a federal securities fraud case against Shkreli told reporters outside court on Wednesday that his client would stop speaking out in his own defense until the charges are resolved.
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The documents also highlighted what some analysts called an apparent contradiction between what Valeant was saying publicly and internally a year ago.
