Turing boss Martin Shkreli slammed for HIV drug price hike also raised cost of pill for kids with kidney disease

MARTIN Shkreli was labelled a “scumbag” and “sociopath” this week, but there’s more to this former child genius’s story. None of it’s good.

IT hasn’t been a good week for Martin Shkreli.

The former child prodigy-turned drug company CEO has been called “the greediest person of all time”, a “morally bankrupt sociopath” and “America’s most hated man” after he hiked up the price of a lifesaving HIV pill from $25 to a mind-boggling $1050 for seemingly no good reason. The pill, Daraprim, costs about $1 to make.

He quickly backflipped on the 4000 per cent price hike amid global scorn, but if Mr Shkreli, 32, thought the worst was behind him, he was wrong.

Now it appears he has been caught doing the exact same thing a year ago, with a drug used to treat a painful — and incurable — children’s kidney disease.

Martin Shkreli is America’s most hated man right now. Picture: Twitter.

BUYING THE KEYS TO BIG PHARMA

The son of European immigrants, Mr Shkreli was born and raised in Brooklyn. He was a standout student who skipped ahead.

He graduated with a business degree from Baruch College in New York in 2004 and within two years was the head of his own hedge fund, Elea Capital Management.

His position afforded him power but collapsed within a year under the weight of a $2.3 million lawsuit. He bounced back with MSMB Capital Management, his second hedge fund, before he began his first foray into pharmaceuticals.

In 2011, Mr Shkreli acquired pharmaceutical company Retrophin along with the rights to sell Thiola, a drug used by 20,000 patients in the US to treat rare and incurable kidney diseases, including a chronic lifelong illness called cystinuria, developed in childhood.

Sufferers, according to researcher Benjamin Davies from the Pittburgh School of Medicine, are the “bravest you will ever meet” but they are forced to be because they go through so much pain.

That pain was made worse when last year Mr Shkreli suddenly bumped up the price of the drug from $2 to $42.

Pharmaceutical finance expert Steve Brozak wrote in Forbes that “as the only supplier of the drug to the US, Retrophin has increased the price for the drug just because it can.”

It was not Mr Shkreli’s only questionable decision that year. According to documents tabled in court, he was also accused of harassing a former employer’s family over money owed to him.

One message to the wife of ex-Retrophin employee Timothy Pierotti read: “How do you sleep at night? Your husband stole millions from me,” according to CNBC.

Mr Shkreli also reportedly sent Pierotti’s son a Facebook friend request “Because I want you to know about your dad betrayed me. He stole $3 million from me.”

Martin Shkreli was a child genius and started his own hedge fund in his 20s.

‘WE COULD MAKE THIS DRUG IN A WEEK’

Sydney University researcher Alice Williamson says Mr Shkreli’s latest price hike is “outrageous” and “unprecedented”.

“People have been getting away with price hikes before because they were small but this was outrageous,” she told news.com.au.

“I’m highly sceptical about his motives because he has done the same thing before. He’s a hedge fund manager and there’s no precedence for him having worked on drug development.”

She said one of the reasons people are so angry was because Daraprim is so simple to make.

“It’s a three-step process and it costs about a dollar to make. I think we could make it in the lab within a week.”

Dr Williamson, a researcher at the university’s School of Chemistry, said Mr Shkreli had damaged the reputation of an already-maligned industry.

“Big pharma will not be happy about this at all.”

Among the vocal critics who piled into the rap music-loving CEO was US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, who wrote on Twitter: “Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous.”

But not everybody is mad. Vox wrote that Shkreli is an American hero and “we should be thanking him today” because he is the perfect villain and nobody cared about price gouging until he came along and stirred collective hatred.

“So perfectly vile” is one way Martin Shkreli was described this week. Picture: Twitter.

‘I CAN SEE HOW THIS LOOKS GREEDY’

Mr Shkreli said on Tuesday he would lower the cost of the medication, however he would not say by how much.

He told NBC News the decision to cut the price was in response to the outrage but now claims cutting the price will force him to sack staff and “curtail research for lethal diseases”, the Guardian reports.

“Yes it is absolutely a reaction — there were mistakes made with respect to helping people understand why we took this action, I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people,” Mr Shkreli said.

“Our first and primary stakeholder is patients. There’s no doubt about that. I can see how it looks greedy, but I think there’s a lot of altruistic properties to it,” he said.

Dr Williamson said the price rise was unlikely to affect Australian patients.

“The problem in the US is Turing is the only one manufacturing the drug and so they can set the price.”

The drug at the centre of the Turing price-hike controversy.