Martin Shkreli’s former company Vyera Pharmaceuticals, once known as Turing and infamous for jacking up the price of anti-parasite drug Daparim overnight, is filing for bankruptcy.
According to documents filed in Delaware bankruptcy court, Vyera blamed the move on dwindling profits, generic drug competition and ongoing litigation around whether the company stifled Daraprim competition.
The company’s aggregated noncontingent liquidated debts are less than $7.5 million, Vyera said in its bankruptcy filing.
Back in Dec. 2021, Vyera agreed to pay up to $40 million to settle charges that it leveraged anticompetitive tactics to ward off generics and keep hold of “monopoly profits” after its more than 4,000% price hike on Daraprim.
In a separate antitrust case linked to Shkreli personally, the infamous “Pharma Bro” was ordered to pay $64.6 million in disgorgement related to money he earned from stifling competition on Daparim. It was from that lawsuit that Shkreli has been banned from future engagement in the pharmaceutical industry.
That ruling was separate from the fraud conviction that landed Shkreli in prison back in 2018.
That lifetime ban didn’t stop Shkreli from co-founding a new company, Druglike, which promises to provide broader access to computing programs for designing potentially therapeutic molecules. The company describes itself as “Web3 drug discovery software platform” and “not a pharmaceutical company.”
The Federal Trade Commission isn’t so sure. Early this year, the FTC asked a federal judge in New York to hold Shkreli in contempt after he failed to hand over documents and sit for an interview as part of an investigation into the company and whether Shkreli’s involvement violates his lifetime industry ban.