Page 7 - Martin Shkreli Case Study
P. 7
Turing Pharmaceuticals
Named after Alan Turing, the
British mathematician who
played a key role in cracking the Nazi Enigma-machine codes.
Turing Pharmaceuticals was founded in February 2015 by Shkreli. He
launched Turing with three drugs in development acquired from
Retrophin:
an intranasal version of ketamine for depression,
an intranasal version of oxytocin, and
Vecamyl for hypertension.
Shkreli set a business strategy for Turing:
to obtain licenses on out-of-patent medicines and reevaluate the
pricing of each in pursuit of windfall profits for the new company,
without the need to develop and bring its own drugs to market.
As markets for out-of-patent drugs are often small, and obtaining
regulatory approval to manufacture a generic version is expensive,
Turing calculated that with closed distribution for the product and no
competition, it could set high prices.
