The Most Unconscionable Drug Price Hike I Have Yet Seen. In the Pipeline:

The Most Unconscionable Drug Price Hike I Have Yet Seen. In the Pipeline:

As has been pointed out, a price hike like this would be very hard to maintain without a government-protected monopoly.

There's a drug called Thiola (tiopronin) that most people have never heard of....Retrophin bought the marketing rights earlier this year (a move complicated by the company's CEO, investor Martin Shkreli, who may have let the news of the deal leak on his Twitter account).
That link mentions part of Shkreli's business plan as "acquiring the rights to obsolete remedies Shkreli says can be put to new and lucrative purposes", and by gosh, that's certainly accurate. Retrophin is increasing the price of Thiola from $1.50 per pill to over $30 per pill. Because they can - they stated when they bought the drug that their first move would be to raise the price. New dosages are formulations are also mentioned, but the first thing is to jack the price up as high as it can be jacked. Note that patients take several pills per day. Shkreli is probably chortling at those Mission Pharmacal hicks who didn't realize what a gold mine they were sitting on.
Now, there have been somewhat similar cases in recent years. Colchicine's price went straight up, and (infamously) so did the progesterone formulation marketed as Makena. But in both those cases, the small companies involved took the compound back through the FDA, under an agency-approved program to get marketing exclusivity. I've argued here (see those last two links) that this idea has backfired several times, and that the benefit from the clinical re-evaluation and re-approval of these drugs has not been worth their vastly increased cost. I think that drug companies should be able to set the price of their drugs, because they have a lot of failures to make up for, but this FDA loophole gives people a chance to do minimal development at minimal risk and be handed a license to print money in return.
But this isn't even one of those cases. It's worse. Retrophin hasn't done any new trials, and they haven't had to. They've just bought someone else's old drug that they believed could be sold for twenty times its price, and have put that plan right into action. No development costs, no risks whatsoever - just slap a new sticker on it and put your hands over your ears. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes people go into fist-clenching rages about the drug industry, and with damn good reason. This one enrages me, and I do drug research for a living.
So thank you, Martin Shkreli. You've accelerated the progress of the giant hammer that's coming down on on all of us over drug pricing, and helped drag the reputation of the pharmaceutical industry even further into the swamp. But what the hell do you care, right? You're going to be raking in the cash. The only thing I can say about Shkreli and Retrophin is that they make the rest of the industry look good in comparison. Some comparison.