Pricing(Gouging) antibiotics. At a time when Novartis, Allergan, Astra Zenica and Sanofi have cancelled their antibacterial programs.
[A HANDFUL OF years ago, a small pharmaceutical company quietly acquired the rights to an old but commonly used antibiotic. Few noticed until last week, when the new owner did something that’s recently become common in the world of pharmaceuticals: It abruptly raised the price. A lot.]
[The manufacturer is called Nostrum Laboratories, and the drug for which it hiked the price—by more than 400 percent—is called nitrofurantoin. It’s a name that probably means nothing to most, but is precious to the 6 to 8 million Americans who get urinary tract infections every year. Nitrofurantoin treats bladder infections, and Nostrum’s version is a liquid, used for children, elderly patients, and anyone who can’t swallow a pill.
The medical community is furious: Two professional societies, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association, called the hike “cynical opportunism” and “opportunistic greed in its most indefensible form.” The company CEO has been unimpressed, telling the Financial Times: “We have to make money when we can.”]
[There’s a lot that’s outrageous in the story of nitrofurantoin: about patients who aren’t a priority in medicine, about predatory pricing, about the government’s inability to force those prices back. But there’s also a surprising irony.For years now, specialists in infectious diseases have been fretting that new antibiotic approvals at the FDA are at an all-time low, and manufacturers are backing away from research. Novartis canceled its antibacterial and antiviral program last July, following Allergan, AstraZeneca, and Sanofi out of the market. Those moves have triggered frantic attempts to imagine incentives tempting enough to lure the companies back. Antibiotics are as expensive to make as any other drug, but they historically have been priced much lower than treatments for heart disease or cancer. That has led some policy makers to imagine: What if we just raised the price?]
[UTIs are a low-acuity, low-margin problem that can be treated with a quick office visit. They overwhelmingly happen to women. For all those reasons, they’re unlikely to make a researcher famous and not a priority for medical research. But because they happen in the millions each year, UTIs represent a substantial money-making opportunity for the handful of companies that manufacture drugs targeting them — even more so because the bacteria that commonly cause UTIs have been growing resistant to other antibiotics.In that, Nostrum and Mulye perceived an opportunity. They weren’t alone. By the time they raised the price of their generic formula, the maker of the branded version, called furadantin, also had hiked the price of its compound by 180 percent.“I think it is a moral requirement to make money when you can,” Mulye told the FT.That didn’t sit well with FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb—who tweeted, “There’s no moral imperative to price gouge and take advantage of patients”—or with senators Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), who sent a letter to Nostrum calling the increase “shocking.”]
[Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and vice-provost at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that case somewhat flippantly in The New York Times in 2015. “As a society we seem willing to pay $100,000 or more for cancer drugs that cure no one and at best add weeks or a few months to life. We are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for knee surgery that, at best, improves function but is not lifesaving,” he wrote. “So why won’t we pay $10,000 for a lifesaving antibiotic?”]
https://www.wired.com/story/antibiotics-pharma-price-jump-is-testing-one-of-medicines-oldest-questions/OK Prana have spent around $150m getting to this stage. They are the inventor of the drug. I think they may have justification to charge some sort of premium.
