Turing Pharmaceuticals
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Turing Pharmaceuticals
In recent weeks Turing Pharmaceuticals has been in the news for raising the price of prescription drugs. The price of Daraprim, a drug to treat toxoplasmosis, was increased by over five thousand percent. The increase has sparked people from both the AIDS and cancer organizations to reach out and attack the ethics of Chief Executive Officer, Martin Shkreli through social media. The increase in price may prevent hospitals from having treatment available for patients who need it. The practice of price gouging prescription drugs has now become an important political topic many candidates running for President of the United States in 2016 will be talking about.
Significance of a Solution Recognizing that developing, manufacturing, and marketing pharmaceuticals is a very profitable business, the case of Turing Pharmaceutical’s purchase and marketing of the drug Daraprim spotlights a potentially serious issue with the way some companies “repackage” existing drugs to create higher profit margins. Daraprim (Pyrimethamine) was originally approved January 23, 1953 for the treatment of toxoplasmosis, an infection caused by a very common parasite (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, n.d.). Because most people never exhibit symptoms of this disease, sales of this drug were very small; and, no generic drug company ever bothered to duplicate the formula (Mayo Clinic, 2015). Seizing the opportunity to “corner the market” on this drug, Turing Pharmaceuticals purchased the rights and immediately raised the price from $13.50 per tablet to $750 per tablet. As in this case, the absence of regulation on the pricing of pharmaceuticals can, and will, cause undue hardship to those that desperately need the drug.
Scope
The vast amount of people affected both directly and indirectly by the pharmaceutical industry is almost