Nonprofit vows to lower generic drug costs

December 14 01:00 2015 by ushadmin

A small team of drug industry veterans in Grafton, MA, has launched a nonprofit startup to make affordable generic medicines to treat critical diseases. “We want to create a competitor to stabilize the prices,” says Deborah J. Drew, founder and CEO of the year-old nonprofit startup called Drew Quality Group, which initially is seeking to raise $2.5 million so it can begin producing drugs as soon as next year. “When you end up with a single-source manufacturer, they can charge any price they want.” Drew and her associates also say they want to produce some of the medicines on FDA’s shortage list. Those drugs, which typically have only a single producer, are in short supply either because their manufacturer is grappling with safety problems or there is no domestic supplier and an overseas producer no longer finds it profitable to make drugs to treat small numbers of patients. By operating as a nonprofit, Drew Quality will not have to pay the same taxes a drug company does. A number of private foundations the group has contacted, including some that back drug research, indicated they did not have a funding category for nonprofit drug manufacturing or a way of evaluating its business plan.