Page 90 - CL Armchair Case

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.