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Martin Shkreli, a man who holds the title “most hated” in the disparate fields of health care and rap, is back to his usual tricks: ratcheting up the price of life-saving medications and generally being vile.
Shkreli set his sights on a drug that fights Chagas disease, a life‐threatening parasitic infection that affects 6 to 7 million people, many of them poor. Shkreli recently took control of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, a company that sells benznidazole, a common treatment for Chagas disease. According to The New York Times, Shkreli plans to take advantage of a federal program that awards vouchers to develop drugs that one company can then sell to another for millions.
Right now in Latin America, where Chagas disease is most common, the typical treatment costs $50 to $100. In the U.S., benznidazole is given out free on an experimental basis to the few cases that crop up.
But Shkreli, who made headlines earlier this year after he pulled a similar stunt with Daraprim, another dug to fight a parasitic infection, is more likely to sell the voucher to develop the drug than actually develop it himself, given that there’s a very small market in the U.S., a way to profit off life-saving medications while not actually helping the people who suffer from them.
Read full, original post: Martin Shkreli Plans To Hike Up the Price for Another Life‐Saving Drug, This Time for Poor People
