'Pharma Bro' firm reaches $40M settlement in gouging case

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A company once owned by “Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli will pay up to $40 million to settle allegations that it jacked up the price of a life-saving medication by roughly 4 ,000% after obtaining exclusive rights to the drug, the Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday.

The FTC said Vyera Pharmaceuticals LLC and its parent company, Phoenixus AG, agreed to settle allegations that it gouged buyers and monopolized sales of Daraprim, which is used to treat toxoplasmosis, an infection that can be deadly for people with HIV or other immune-system problems and can cause serious problems for children born to women infected while pregnant.

Vyera raised the price of the decades-old drug from $17.50 to $750 per pill after obtaining exclusive rights to it in 2015.

“Should be a very handsome investment for all of us,” Shkreli put it in an email to a contact at the time.

The increase left some patients facing co-pays as high as $16,000 and sparked an outcry that fueled congressional hearings.

The company was sued in federal court in New York by the FTC and seven states: New York, California, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

The lawsuit alleged that Vyera hiked the price of Daraprim and illegally created “a web of anticompetitive restrictions" to prevent other companies from creating cheaper generic versions by, among other things, blocking their access to a key ingredient for the medication and to data the companies would want to evaluate the drug’s market potential.

An after-hours email message to Vyera seeking comment wasn't immediately returned. But after the lawsuit was filed last year, the company called its claims meritless and denied that its actions froze out potential competitors.

The settlement filed Tuesday requires...