Turing Pharmaceuticals hiked Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a tablet, igniting a firestorm

A pharmaceutical startup at the center of the 2015 Daraprim repricing; commenters described its model as buying old, sole-source drugs and raising prices by orders of magnitude.

That a startup could buy an off-patent, sole-source drug and raise its price ~55x, with insurers forced to pay and no generic willing to enter.

Turing Pharmaceuticals was the company in the story, with Martin Shkreli — previously of Retrophin — identified by commenters as running the same playbook: find an old orphan drug, raise the price by orders of magnitude, and expect insurers to pay because there were no competitors. Turing had paid $55 million for Daraprim (pyrimethamine), an old, off-patent drug that was sold for about $1 a pill a few years earlier and that commenters noted was the only FDA-approved treatment for toxoplasmosis.

The New York Times reported on 2015-09-21 that Turing had raised Daraprim's price from $13.50 to $750 a tablet overnight — roughly a 55x increase. In the Hacker News discussion that followed, commenters argued about whether the market would discipline Turing: generic entry was deterred by small patient numbers and by Turing's control of distribution, and the FDA's slow generic-approval pipeline bought the company time. Several pointed to KV Pharmaceuticals, which had raised the price of the preterm-birth drug Makena and ended in bankruptcy after the FDA declined to shut down compounding pharmacies making the same drug. One commenter recounted being recruited for an IT role at Turing in February 2015 and withdrawing after researching Shkreli.

A sole-source off-patent drug with tiny patient numbers looked like a pricing gift: no generic maker had the incentive to enter, so insurers were expected to pay the new price.

Turing paid $55M for Daraprim partly because it was an approved Medicare drug, giving the repriced product an immediate, defensible route to reimbursement.

The same play had a visible template: KV Pharmaceuticals' Makena price increase — which ended in bankruptcy — was known to investors in the space, yet Turing repeated the model.

The company controlled the bottleneck: tight distribution could keep generic competitors from even obtaining samples, extending the window for monopoly pricing.

A price a captive market must pay is a political liability, not a moat: a 55x hike on a life-saving drug invites outrage and response, and the identical play had already bankrupted KV Pharmaceuticals.

As of 2015-09-21 Turing was selling Daraprim at $750 a tablet after the NYT report of the overnight increase; the story had become one of Hacker News's largest threads of the day, with 830 points and 450 comments. Commenters predicted generic entry, regulatory response, or a KV-style collapse, but the material records no resolution beyond that day's discussion.