Pro­to­cols: My­lan’s EpiPen strat­e­gy stirs fresh out­rage over price goug­ing; a flail­ing Wood­ford halts big bonus­es

For­get Mar­tin Shkre­li. The bad-guy role in the phar­ma world has now been hand­ed to My­lan, which has been hit with a tsuna­mi of me­dia cov­er­age about its price goug­ing habits in­volv­ing the EpiPen. The decades old in­jec­tion de­vice need­ed to sur­vive life-threat­en­ing al­ler­gic episodes was sold for $100 back in 2007, when My­lan bought it, and now goes for $608.61 af­ter a se­ries of steep price hikes. The price has risen so high, some par­ents can’t af­ford it any longer, and an on­line mob has as­sem­bled to dig­i­tal­ly pil­lo­ry My­lan. My­lan, of course, is fol­low­ing a tried and true prac­tice in phar­ma­land, steadi­ly hik­ing whole­sale prices of old tech­nol­o­gy. Eli Lil­ly, among many oth­ers, has been do­ing ex­act­ly the same thing for quite some time. And with politi­cians fo­cused on a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year, fears con­tin­ue to rise in the in­dus­try that elect­ed of­fi­cials may at­tempt to stop the prac­tice. There are no laws pre­vent­ing price goug­ing in bio­phar­ma, but some politi­cians are look­ing for the FTC to in­ves­ti­gate mo­nop­oly pric­ing. Mar­tin Shkre­li got this con­tro­ver­sy start­ed with his de­ci­sion to hike the price of an an­cient ther­a­py by  more than 5000%. Soon af­ter, Valeant be­come the poster child for price ma­nip­u­la­tion. And it has be­come a po­tent con­sumer is­sue that may well af­fect every­one in drug de­vel­op­ment, even­tu­al­ly.

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