Schoolboys take down (bastard) Martin Shkreli.

[canetoad]

Martin Shkreli was the ''big pharma bro" who outraged the world by hiking the price of an essential drug from $US13.50 ($18) to $US750 a tablet.

Now a handful of year 11 students in Sydney have shown him up, cooking the same drug in their school lab for about $2 a dose.
<snip>

From the 17 grams starting material, the boys produced 3.7 grams of pyrimethamine, the chemical name of Daraprim.

"That's about $US110,000 worth of the drug," Dr Williams said, based on the price mark-up of Turing Pharmaceuticals.

This wonderful discovery is part of the work done by Sydney University and the Open Source Malaria Consortium. I hope these young guys go on to save thousands of lives.

Edit: Forgot link. http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/sydney-schoolboys-take-down-martin-shkreli-the-most-hated-man-in-the-world-20161125-gsxcu5.html

[meow2u3]

1. These kids have a real future

Not only in their careers, but also in saving people's lives while trying to shame price gouging bastards like "Pharma Douche" into behaving like civilized human beings.

[usaf-vet]

18. If they stay in Sydney. Avoid coming to America until we get our heads out of the sand.

Good work young men.!

[Wounded Bear]

2. Great job to those kids, but that's not the point, of course...

The root question is: Do we allow our medical care (and other essential services) to be fully at the mercy of for-profit industrialists and investors?

Obviously, Shkreli didn't raise the price because of cost of manufacture/processing. He did it because he could. In the warped world of pure Libertarianism, this is just fine, because the magical "market" will eventually force him to lower the price due to lack of sales. It doesn't work that way, and given our current climate, I would expect these kids to be facing a patent violation lawsuit soon, because assholes like Shkreli are defended by our legal system. He gets patent protection against competition, and when his patent is close to expiring, he can make minor adjustments to the formula and get an extension.

If people die, well, I guess they should have made more money.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

8. Yet the RW talking point is that it's government regulations that prevent competition and therefore

cause high drug prices. They really have thought of everything in their propaganda campaign, haven't they? Just like they created the illusion that the left has done so many awful things that by comparison, Trump just looks normal.

We have got to so more to fight back. The wealthy Rs are willing to spend shitloads of cash on their ongoing, sophisticated propaganda machine, but wealthy Ds have been reluctant to fund the necessary countermeasures to combat that. If not for the people who who have been brainwashed by RW lies, the Rs could never win an election.

[eppur_se_muova]

15. Free market for thee, gov't protection and subsidies for me.

The stench of hypocrisy is overpowering, yet so many Repug voters are numb to it.

[IronLionZion]

17. Trump says yes

and Skreli is a big Trumper

The libertarian/republican argument is if a greedy bastard jacks up the price of something, others will produce and sell it at a lower cost. If it's patent protected, they will produce something that is slightly different or invest R&D to make a better one.

[TheBlackAdder]

3. That 20 is before the economy of scale, due to volume purchasing and processing, is applied.

.


For some reason, the $ (dollar sign) is not appearing in the title box.

.

[iluvtennis]

4. so cool.... n/t

[Javaman]

5. jesse pinkmen?

all kidding aside. Good on these kids.

[still_one]

6. Excellent. I wonder if trump will choose Shkreli as the drug czar

[jmowreader]

7. Nope. Democrats don't hate him enough

[etherealtruth]

9. I love smart kids

[harun]

10. Kindness Greed

[SCantiGOP]

11. This needs to be on all the news shows N/T

[Hekate]

12. KnR

[lady lib]

13. Cool. (nt)

[eppur_se_muova]

14. This is not a terribly complicated molecule, and shouldn't be hard to make*.

In most pharmaceuticals -- especially wholly synthetic ones -- the cost of materials is a pretty trivial part of the final cost. If someone wants to make the substantial investment in setting up a process plant to produce this drug by a new synthetic pathway, they could. The question is at least partly whether Shrkeli's company owns, or leases, a "novel combination of matter" patent. It would be the norm for the active ingredient itself, its various formulations in pill, tablet, serum etc. forms, and its use for the treatment of disease all to be covered by patents. If you come up with a cheaper synthesis than the patented one(s), you must still pay to license the NCOM patents, or be refused a license by the patent holder. (As it turns out, the patents in this case have long expired. Yet somehow "rights" to control the drug are still in force.)

It's a lot like diamonds -- before Cecil Rhodes consolidated most of the diamond mines in SA as DeBeers, diamonds were getting to be so ridiculously cheap that even people of very modest means could buy diamond jewelry (at least for wedding rings), and the competition among the individual mine holders to sell what diamonds they could find threatened to drive prices even lower. Rhodes recognized that the value of diamonds was only partly due to their rarity, but largely due to how loosely or tightly the market was controlled. Once DeBeers had a near-monopoly, the market was very tightly controlled indeed, much as it is today, and diamond prices quickly climbed to a level where the holders of DeBeers shares could get very rich for very little effort, instead of going broke fighting each other for market share. Likewise, the costs of drugs remain high while patents are in force but quickly plummet when the patents expire and generics hit the market. This is why Big Pharma is fighting so hard to get patents extended for longer periods than the current 17 years (renewable), and to lower the bar for getting extensions granted on patents they already hold.

From the article:

"While the drug is out of patent, Turing Pharmaceuticals controls its distribution and sale through a loophole called the 'closed distribution model'," said Associate Professor Todd.

"To take the drug to market as a generic, you need to compare it to Turing's product. If Turing won't allow the comparisons to take place, you'd need to fund a whole new trial," he said.

Here's a link to an article from the Wikipedia page: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2015/09/21/heres-a-way-for-pharma-to-prevent-outrageous-generic-price-increases-and-help-its-reputation/#7bd4bf131872 Unfortunately, it doesn't explain how a company can maintain a claim to "medical rights" -- what the heck does that mean ? -- on a product whose patents expired decades ago. If there is a legal battle to be had, I suspect it is on this issue that one is most needed.



* I wouldn't hesitate to ask a class of 2nd-semester Organic students to propose a synthesis of this compound as a homework exercise or final exam question. I chose to sketch out a synthesis (i.e. on paper) starting with dirt cheap 4-chlorotoluene; two steps would get you to (4-chlorophenyl)acetonitrile, the intermediate described in the article, which is (surprise!) rather cheaply available anyway. Most of the steps are just obvious to an organic chemist, so it's no surprise to see the same intermediate involved in two independent proposals. I'd still be interested to see what the remaining steps in their synthesis were, since the article said they had to avoid the use of "dangerous" intermediates. Hmmm. Hard to know where they would draw the line on that, so hard to tell what options were available.

[hunter]

19. I grew up in a time of great danger.

Our school district's "gifted" program exposed us to all sorts of horrors.

In fifth grade I remember heating cinnabar (mercury sulfide) in a test tube to see the elemental mercury condensing at the mouth of the tube.

Me and my buddies played with mercury quite a bit, especially after we found a damaged mercury arc rectifier in the dumpsters of a local manufacturer. We carefully cracked it open and drained it's mercury into a jar to play with.

In college the use of benzene to clean glassware was discouraged in favor of acetone, but it wasn't yet disallowed if we used the fume hood and gloves.

I was teaching science at the time they were clearing the dangerous stuff out of school labs, most of it dating from the Sputnik panic when the U.S.A. realized public school science curriculum was inadequate and threw a lot of money at the problem. There were lists of things that had to go and we were supposed to lock them up and notify the hazard disposal people when we found them. Some of the stuff on the dusty back shelves of the labs really was dangerous, for example ethers that turn into explosives as the years pass, but sometimes they'd take things like entire vacuum pumps and their glass bells when it would have been best to resupply labs with replacement bells and safety cages.

But there was no longer any money for that.

It's even worse now. My wife's sister still teaches science, she is expected to do labs once a week, and her semester budget for supplies is woefully inadequate, just as it was when I was teaching. I'd do labs using materials the students could bring in from home, and often materials I bought myself.

[kebob]

16. Isn't Calling Shkreli a "Bastard" Redundant?

/