The story of young students and the exorbitantly expensive drug daraprim has drawn attention

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This post was last edited by dlutyj on 2016-12-11 at 14:23. As is well known, in today’s pharmaceutical industry, drugs with exorbitant prices are common; the era when everyone could afford medical treatment is long gone. It is no longer unusual for a drug to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet not long ago, according to investigations by Mofan.com, an Asian high school student in Australia, driven by his strong interest in chemistry and with the help of his teacher, managed to produce daraprim, a life-saving drug that costs $110,000 in the United States. What’s even more incredible is that his production cost was only $20. This news caused a huge uproar in a short time, as well as moral criticism directed at pharmaceutical companies. At this point, let Ben Dui summarize for you the facts and controversies surrounding daraprim in the past. The organic synthesis of daraprim began in a laboratory in 1952, and it was successfully introduced to the market in 1953 as an antimalarial drug. It became an important medication for treating AIDS patients. Due to the passage of time, its patent protection period has long expired, and it has been included in the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. This may lead many to wonder why such essential medicines can still be so expensive. Let me explain: Although daraprim should ideally be affordable, throughout its chemical synthesis and production process, its sales rights changed hands several times, eventually falling into the hands of the American company Turing. Turing acquired these sales rights at a very high cost, and of course it wanted to recoup that investment. Unfortunately, it raised the price by 55 times, which caused great dissatisfaction among the American public at the time. These days, an increasing number of single-agent drugs, or drugs that target specific conditions, have become items that pharmaceutical companies sell at higher prices. With research and development costs reaching hundreds of billions, it is understandable for drug companies to seek to recoup those costs through high prices; however, it is also a fact that this increases the burden on the public.