Competition Compounded
ArsTechnica: Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company that last month raised the price of the decades-old drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750, now has a competitor.
Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical company based in San Diego, announced today that it has made an alternative to Daraprim that costs about a buck a pill—or $99 for a 100-pill supply.
Good news. Competition is working. But I was puzzled. In Generic Drug Regulation and Pharmaceutical Price-Jacking, I argued that competition was slow because the FDA makes it expensive and time consuming to get a generic drug approved for sale in the United States. Was I wrong about the difficulty of generic entry? No.
The drug that Imprimis Pharmaceuticals is selling is not FDA-approved. A bit of background is in order. Even today some drugs need to be tailor-made. A patient, for example, might not be able to swallow a pill so a licensed pharmacist may create for a specific, individual patient a small batch of the drug in liquid form. A pharmacy that does this kind of work is called a compounding pharmacy.
Compounding pharmacies have a long and tendentious history with the FDA. The FDA has always claimed that a new drug is a new drug, even one created only for a specific individual. Thus, the FDA has always said that it has the right to regulate compounding pharmacies just like manufacturers of new drugs. In practice, however, the FDA allowed the industry to proceed with little regulation.
In the 1990s some compounding pharmacies began to create large batches, especially of drugs in short supply, as a way of avoiding the FDA process. The FDA worried about quality control, however, and it re-evaluated its traditional hands off approach. A political battle then ensued in which Congress and the Supreme Court also had their say. In 2012, fungal meningitis outbreaks caused by poor quality control at the New England Compounding Center brought these issue to public attention and resulted in greater regulation of compounding pharmacies, albeit with clearer regulations on when a compounding pharmacy may sell large quantities.
Imprimis Pharmaceuticals did not apply for approval to sell a generic version of Daraprim. As I argued earlier, that would take years and cost millions of dollars. Instead, it is doing an old-style end-run of the FDA process by offering its alternative under the compounding pharmacy laws. That means that it can only sell to order, on a patient by patient, prescription by prescription basis. Since Daraprim is not widely used this may work. Indeed, I hope this end run works but my reading of the act is that compounders can only supply drugs in large quantities if they are on the FDA’s shortage list. Perhaps the FDA will look the other way, however, in order to send Turing and similar firms a message.