About a month after Martin Shkreli's former company inked a $40 million settlement to resolve allegations of anticompetitive conduct on toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim, the "pharma bro" has learned his fate in his own antitrust case.
A federal judge ordered the former Turing executive to pay $64.6 million in disgorgement related to money he earned from stifling competition after hiking Daraprim's price by thousands of percent overnight, according to New York Attorney General Letitia James. The judge also ordered the former pharma executive, who is serving a seven-year sentence for a separate fraud case, to be barred from the pharmaceutical industry for life.
The ruling came in a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), New York and other states. It's separate from a fraud conviction that landed Shkreli in prison back in 2018.
In January 2020, the FTC and James sued Vyera—formerly known as Turing Pharmaceuticals—plus former CEOs Shkreli and Kevin Mulleady for allegedly blocking competition on its key medicine to preserve monopoly profits. The officials said Turing restricted distribution of its drug so that generic companies couldn't conduct bioequivalence tests and prevented rivals from accessing a key ingredient used in the drug's production.
As a result, hospitals, patients and others had to pay "exorbitant prices or otherwise be forced to make difficult treatment decisions" because they couldn't access the treatment, officials said at the time. California, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia later joined the FTC and New York lawsuit.
Turing notoriously raised the price of Daraprim in September 2015. Nationwide outrage ensued, and Shkreli eventually became known as the "pharma bro" and the "most hated man in America."
The company later changed its name to Vyera Pharmaceuticals. Last month, it inked a $40 million settlement to resolve the FTC's case. That deal also resulted in a seven-year ban from most pharmaceutical industry roles for Mulleady.