High School Students Produce Daraprim for Just $2
Although already on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines, Daraprim became even more famous last year when pharmeceutical CEO Martin Shkreli raised the price per pill last year by 5,000%. Daraprim is used to fight the parasitic disease toxoplasmosis, which is potentially life-threatening for people with weakened immune systems, such as those with AIDS or cancer. What once cost users $13.50 per pill now costs $750.
Now, however, an after-school program in Australia has managed to produce Daraprim in their school lab. According to ABC Australia the high school students from Sydney Grammar School in Sydney, Australia created 3.7 grams of pyrimethamine, the active ingredient in Daraprim, for $20, which breaks down to roughly $2 a pill. This economical result makes the life saving drug more accesible to people world wide, not bad for an extracurricular.
While the drug is out of patent, Turing Pharmaceuticals controls the distribution of the drug in the US. This means a competitor (such as the new student’s drug) could be sold on the US open market as long as it compared in trials to Shkreli’s product, according to Business Insider.
Watch a video interviewing student participants here.
