Remember Martin Shkreli, the hedge-fund manager who last year founded Turing Pharmaceuticals, acquired an essential anti-parasitic drug, and quickly jacked up its price 55-fold, from $13.50 to $750 a pill? Well, he’s just been shown up by a group of high school chemistry students in Australia who’ve produced a generic version of Turing’s drug, Daraprim, for $2 a pill, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
Led by chemist Alice Williamson and motivated by a dose of disgust, a class of Sydney Grammar School students turned 17 grams of 2,4-chlorophenyl acetonitrile into 3.7 grams of pyrimethamine, the active ingredient in Daraprim.
If that sold in the US as Daraprim, it would cost about $100,000 because of the price hike, notes the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The project was more about principle than anything else, says Williamson.
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