
Company Raises the Price of a Drug That Fights Infant Epilepsy by 85,000% - Parbeyjr
https://futurism.com/company-raises-the-price-of-a-drug-that-fights-infant-epilepsy-by-85000/
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CamelCaseName
My line of thinking has always been that developing and selling drugs is very
expensive. Without the possibility of being acquired and selling a vial for
five figures, there's no way it would have existed in the first place.

Going off the numbers in the article, MNK sold $1B last year. At $34K/vial
that's about almost 12 vials per infant (2,500/yr) per year. (Assuming the
course of treatment is one year)

When the vials were selling for $40 each, they would have brought in $1.2MM -
I'm no expert, but that doesn't even sound like enough to rent a lab and hire
scientists/technicians.

The real headline of this article should be, "MNK settles $100MM lawsuit over
anti-competitive drug pricing behavior" (or something more catchy) -- That, to
me, is the real interesting bit.

How regulations work around drug pricing is where media focus should be, and
there are just as many soundbites in that discussion for the media to latch on
to as well.

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maxerickson
Of course, we know from history that it existed for $40 a vial. Looking into
it, it was identified in the 1930s and a synthetic analogue was developed in
the 1960s.

I imagine the one weird trick they were using to bring down costs is only to
devote a small number of days each year to producing the particular drug. It'd
be interesting to see the current production costs.

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devoply
One way to deal with this problem is simply to take away the drug patent if a
company is found to engage in this sort of behavior, make that law. Their drug
becomes a generic to be manufactured by other companies if they are found to
be profiteering off a drug. Then under threat of losing it all hanging over
their heads, drug companies will behave themselves.

How do you decide what is profiteering, let the courts decide, just pass the
law and then pass the judgment to the courts. They will use common law and all
the other stuff they have under their belt to make that decision, economic
theory and what not.

The point is to get business strategists to understand that there is a risk of
bluntly increases prices to make a profit.

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FullMtlAlcoholc
They also would simply refuse to research and develop any new drugs under that
regulatory environment. Drug companies are. not benevolent entities, they are
as cuththroat, or even moee so than Wall Street.

The real issue is the cost and length of clinical trials. I know this can be
lowered somewhat by allowing computational models, but it is a difficult
problem to solve unless biotech goes through the same garage Revolution as the
PC

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gwright
One way to address this is to create different standards of evaluation and to
adjust the legal liabilities accordingly.

What I mean (very roughly) is something like:

Untested => you are on your own, don't imagine you can sue anyone if something
goes wrong, this is the default Conditional => some basic efficacy/safety
protocols have been evaluated, some limited liability for the drug companies,
Approved => full suite of evaluation done, liability still capped but at a
much higher level then Conditional

There would still be legal safeguards around fraudulent or negligent practices
of course that wouldn't be constrained by the capped liability I suggested
above.

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inetsee
I couldn't see anything in the article (or the linked press release) to
indicate whether the settlement included reducing the price to something less
outrageous.

