‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli’s former company, Vyera Pharmaceuticals, sealed a deal to sell the rights of Daraprim — the antiparasitic drug the company famously price-hiked in 2015.
As part of Vyera Pharmaceuticals’ bankruptcy, the company will sell off Daraprim along with hypertension drug Vecamyl to Tilde Sciences for $650,000, according to anasset purchase agreement. Vyera was formerly known as Turing Pharmaceuticals when Shkreli was at the helm.
The move is another chapter in the long saga for Daraprim, or pyrimethamine, which has been Food and Drug Administration-approved and available since the 1950s. The drug has switched hands between pharma companies since 2010, when GlaxoSmithKline, now GSK, sold the rights to CorePharma.
After a few more transitions, Turing Pharmaceuticals purchased the rights to the drug in 2015, then raised the price of a single tablet from $13.50 to $750.
At the time, the controversial move generated widespread media attention and earned Shkreli the nickname ‘Pharma Bro.’
Subsequently, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison for separate counts of securities fraud in 2017. Turing changed its name to Vyera the same year.
With no other generic available at the time, Vyera managed to keep Daraprim’s price high, which ultimately attracted scrutiny over its monopoly power. In early 2020, the Federal Trade Commission sued Shkreli along with Vyera for “illegally monopolizing” Daraprim, arguing that Shkreli and Vyera execs had attempted to suppress competition illicitly.
“Daraprim is a lifesaving drug for vulnerable patients,” Gail Levine, deputy director of the Bureau of Competition at the FTC, said at the time. “Vyera kept the price of Daraprim astronomically high by illegally boxing out the competition.”
In February 2020, the FDA approved a Daraprim generic to treat toxoplasmosis from Cerovene. In May,Vyera filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Even though Shkreli was released from prison early in 2022, he has a lifetime ban from working in the pharma industry.
That hasn’t stopped him from dabbling in adjacent waters, however. Following his release from prison, he co-founded a company called Druglike, which claims on its website that it’s a platform for “democratizing the access, costs, and rewards of early-stage drug discovery.”
The FTC has already raised questions over Druglike and Shkreli’s involvement.
In February, the FTC asked a federal judge in New York to hold Shkreli in civil contempt for allegedly violating the lifetime pharma ban.
