According to an article on cnbc.com, Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, is causing quite a stir in the community of sufferers of Chagas disease, a parasitic infection that can lead to heart issues, that can potentially be fatal.
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In September, Shkreli became infamous for buying the USA sales rights to a form of HIV medication and increasing the price dramatically. If a pharmaceutical company submits a drug for a disease on the program’s list, the FDA gives the company a “priority review voucher”.
However, in a recent conference call Shkreli suggested that he has plans of jacking up the cost of this drug in the USA in a similar manner of the price increase of the essential hepatitis C drugs which has enraged several across the US. He added that the price of the drug will be same to that of hepatitis C drugs, which cost $60,000 to almost $100,000 for a course of treatment.
According to the New York Times, Shkreli hopes to gain Food and Drug Administration approval via a second company named KaloBios to license benznidazole, which is now not approved by the agency for use in the USA but is now free for some patients via a trial program run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
After dropping $2 million on a Wu-Tang Clan album, the pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has found a new project: making an essential treatment unaffordable for poor immigrants from Latin America.
Although the news does come as it is announced that America has suffered an outbreak of the kissing bug, which is one of the major ways Chagas disease is spread.
“It’s caused a lot of angst in the Chagas community”, Dr. Sheba Meymandi, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of a Chagas treatment centre at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center told the New York Times.
Right now in Latin America, where Chagas disease is most common, the typical treatment costs $50 to $100. As a part of the program, the FDA awards vouchers that can be sold to other companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. That said, the risk of contracting the parasite in the USA remains small; most people who have the disease in the United States already had it when they arrived. Shkreli wants to get the voucher for getting the Chagos drug approved by the FDA.
Shkreli’s company, KaloBios, bought the drug, called Benznidazole, last week.
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Mr Shkreli estimates that between 3,000 and 7,000 people will require treatment for the acute infection each year in the United States.
