The Sen­ate dis­sects Mar­tin Shkre­li's scheme to grab a $1B wind­fall

What­ev­er else you may have to say about Mar­tin Shkre­li and his team at Tur­ing, they did their home­work.

They want­ed to find a poor­ly per­form­ing or­phan drug serv­ing a small pa­tient pop­u­la­tion that had a sole-source man­u­fac­tur­er to sup­ply the mar­ket, so dis­tri­b­u­tion could be care­ful­ly con­trolled. And Dara­prim at Im­pax fit that bill per­fect­ly.

Be­cause a “clas­sic closed dis­tri­b­u­tion play” like Dara­prim served a small pa­tient pop­u­la­tion, they not­ed in emails and doc­u­ments cit­ed by the new Sen­ate re­port on drug pric­ing, there weren’t enough peo­ple in­volved to gen­er­ate an ef­fec­tive lob­by­ing cam­paign that might greet a sud­den price hike. Oth­er gener­ic man­u­fac­tur­ers could be barred from get­ting their hands on the prod­uct, keep­ing com­pe­ti­tion at bay. And the price could be set where they want­ed it, tak­ing a drug with lit­tle an­nu­al rev­enue and cre­at­ing an op­por­tu­ni­ty to make hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in a quick wind­fall.

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