Contrary to this report quoting an AP press release, this company is not marketing a "generic version" of Daraprim. Patients should not simply substitute their product.
Stepping into the furor over eye-popping price spikes for old generic medicines, a maker of compounded drugs will begin selling $1 doses of Daraprim, whose price recently was jacked up to $750 per pill by Turing Pharmaceuticals.
San Diego-based Imprimis Pharmaceuticals Inc., which mixes approved drug ingredients to fill individual patient prescriptions, said Thursday it will supply capsules containing Daraprim's active ingredients, pyrimethamine and leucovorin, for $99 for a 100-capsule bottle, via its site: www.imprimiscares.com.
Daraprim is the GSK brand name for pyrimethamin and is imported to the USA for less than $1 a tablet. Their tablets do not contain leucovorin which may be prescribed in addition to Daraprim. Leucovorin in known outside the USA as
folinic acid.
Folinic acid is also sometimes used to prevent toxic effects of high doses of antimicrobial dihydrofolate reductase inhibitors such as trimethoprim and pyrimethamine. It may be prescribed in the treatment of toxoplasmosis retinitis, in combination with the folic acid antagonists pyrimethamine and sulfadiazine.
Imprimis Pharmaceuticals is wrongly described in the headlines as a drugs company. As is made clear later, it is a compounding company which mixes drug combinations for individual patients. My memory of a contamination scandal at such a company was that they were not regulated by the FDA but by the individual state. Others may know if this legal position has changed.
The compounding appears to be a way of getting round the sole marketing rights for Daraprim in the USA that GSK sold and are now owned by Turning Pharmaceuticals whose CEO Martin Shkrel has been the subject of much comment for raising the price from $17.50 to $350. Daraprim is available from UK on-line pharmacies for as little as £0.11 or about 17 cents. Some of the additional cost will be due to the historical expense of getting FDA approval but there is no way that even $17.50 can be ethically justified.
This story appears to have been written by people reading a press release from the company with little or no knowledge of pharmaceuticals who have not bothered to google the drugs' names.