The call for a whole­sale rewrite of drug pric­ing has tak­en on a fever pitch in re­cent years, reg­u­lar­ly be­com­ing part of pres­i­den­tial stump speech­es and con­gres­sion­al horse trad­ing. The fo­cus is usu­al­ly on high-price brand­ed meds, but now a new shark is in the wa­ter go­ing af­ter pricey gener­ics as well.

In an ef­fort to of­fer low-cost al­ter­na­tives to pricey gener­ic med­i­cines, bil­lion­aire in­vestor Mark Cuban has put his name to a new com­pa­ny dubbed Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs — an on-the-nose moniker for sure, but one with the se­ri­ous am­bi­tion of un­der­cut­ting the mar­ket on tar­get­ed meds.

The new com­pa­ny’s ver­sion of rad­i­cal trans­paren­cy will in­clude di­vulging its cost of de­vel­op­ment and dis­tri­b­u­tion and then adding a flat 15% mar­gin on­to all prod­ucts for whole­sale — enough, it says, to of­fer a cheap al­ter­na­tive for high-price meds.

The goal is even­tu­al­ly to launch more than 100 drugs on­to the mar­ket by the end of this year, but the firm will start with an­tipar­a­sitic al­ben­da­zole, which it says it will of­fer at an av­er­age price per tablet of $20 com­pared with the cur­rent av­er­age of $225 MSRP. For in­sured pa­tients, that price could go “as low as a dol­lar,” the com­pa­ny said on its web­site.

“Our low cost al­ben­da­zole prod­uct al­lows physi­cians to af­ford­ably treat hook­worm out­breaks through­out Amer­i­ca that were pre­vi­ous­ly too ex­pen­sive to treat sys­tem­i­cal­ly be­fore,” the com­pa­ny wrote.

While de­tails are scant on where the com­pa­ny will source its med­i­cines in the short term, it is plan­ning to build a new man­u­fac­tur­ing site in Dal­las — true to Cuban’s roots — by 2022. A re­quest for com­ment was not an­swered by press time.

Drug­mak­ers look­ing to rewrite the rules of pric­ing are noth­ing new in an in­dus­try where the list price of drugs has be­come a hot-but­ton po­lit­i­cal is­sues. How­ev­er, those cru­sades are usu­al­ly in the world of brand­ed med­i­cines, where cor­nered mar­kets can pro­duce in­flat­ed prices.

Just last week, dis­rup­tive biotech EQRx snagged a $500 mil­lion Se­ries B to pur­sue its ver­sion of a pric­ing re­work, pledg­ing to bring cost-ef­fec­tive on­col­o­gy and im­munol­o­gy meds to mar­ket. That will be­gin with four can­cer drugs it has in-li­censed and which could be ready for mar­ket with­in the next two years.

But go­ing af­ter gener­ic drugs — a mar­ket where the go­ing think­ing is prices are al­ready com­pet­i­tive — is a rel­a­tive­ly unique twist, and Cuban’s in­volve­ment ob­vi­ous­ly adds some heft to the mis­sion state­ment.

But the com­pa­ny could have a dual pur­pose in hit­ting the mar­ket when it did. With the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic shut­ting down sup­ply chains for gener­ic med­i­cines around the world, politi­cians and in­vestors have called for re­dun­dan­cy in sup­ply on US shores, look­ing to lim­it the in­flu­ence of Chi­na and In­dia, two of the lead­ing play­ers in fin­ished gener­ic med­i­cines and in­gre­di­ents.

The Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion over the course of the pan­dem­ic has float­ed mas­sive fund­ing of­fers for a few of those tar­get­ed com­pa­nies, some with big names. In the case of Ko­dak, most fa­mous for its cam­eras, the gov­ern­ment in­vest­ment arm, the De­vel­op­ment Fi­nance Cor­po­ra­tion, of­fered a $765 mil­lion loan to get their own gener­ics phar­ma en­try off the ground. But ac­cu­sa­tions of in­sid­er trad­ing and an SEC in­ves­ti­ga­tion even­tu­al­ly sent that ini­tia­tive in­to a tail­spin in Au­gust.

More than five years after Corey Fishman and Michael Dunne dusted sulopenem off Pfizer’s shelves — the second castoff antibiotic they’ve brought out of the pharma giant — and founded Iterum Therapeutics around that single drug, they have lined up a quick shot at approval with priority review from the FDA.

The decision, six months from now, will mark a make-or-break moment for a struggling biotech that has just enough cash to keep the lights on until the third quarter.

Immunocore spent much of 2019 dealing with the fallout of the Neil Woodford scandal, as the former star investor’s fall crashed the biotech’s valuation out of unicorn range. Now it turns out that the company spent 2020 dealing with another internal scandal.

The longtime UK biotech darling disclosed in their IPO filing last week that they had fallen victim to an alleged kickback scheme involving one of their employees. After a whistleblower came forward, they said in their F-1, they spent the summer and spring investigating, finding fraud on the part of an employee and two outside vendors.