Physicians Create Start-up to Fight Expensive Generic Drugs

September 23 01:00 2015 by ushadmin

A group of Johns Hopkins trained physicians has started a crowdfunding campaign to create a start-up which produces cheap generic drugs (campaign web site: www.igg.me/at/cheapdrugs).

The campaign comes in response to recent dramatic increases in the prices of generic pharmaceuticals. For example, the price of Daraprim, a drug used to fight an AIDS related infection, has increased in cost from $13.50 a pill to $750 after rights to the drug were acquired by Turing Pharmaceuticals.

“We are increasingly frustrated by outrageous increases in the prices of generic pharmaceuticals and artificial shortages of common drugs,” says founder Alexander Oshmyansky, MD, PhD. “It is affecting the healthcare we can provide and endangering patient lives here in the US.

“Our campaign seeks to raise $1M to perform the necessary early development towards building a pharmaceutical plant to create cheap generic pharmaceuticals. We need people to help us in this fight.”

The group of physicians intends to create a public service B Corporation, “Cheap Drugs, Inc.,” with the intention of producing affordable generic pharmaceuticals again.

Alex Oshmyansky, one of the physicians, holds an MD from Duke University, a PhD in mathematics from the University of Oxford where he was a Marshall Scholar, a BA in Biochemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and completed residency training at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins. He graduated from college at the age of 18, and his first company, Altitude Medical, Inc., sells devices to prevent the spread of hospital-acquired infections.