© Jake Hollings for Mosaic

Debate over what constitutes a fair price for drugs isn’t anything new. Nor is it limited to Europe.

Because of his willingness to play the bad guy in the press (and an odd moment when he bought a Wu-Tang Clan record), Martin Shkreli has attracted more criticism on drug pricing than perhaps anyone else. In 2015, Turing Pharmaceuticals, of which Shkreli was CEO, raised the price of its recently acquired antimalarial drug Daraprim, also used to treat AIDS-related illnesses. A pill went from $13.50 to $750 overnight – a 55-fold increase.

Shkreli’s capitalist tendencies were criticised by almost everyone. This was unlike the situation with CDCA Leadiant – there was no argument that this increase was to cover Daraprim’s development costs – and Shkreli himself was unrepentant: “If there was a company that was selling an Aston Martin at the price of a bicycle, and we buy that company and we ask to charge Toyota prices, I don’t think that that should be a crime,” he told reporters.

But the Daraprim situation was just the highest-profile example of a contest that is going on constantly between big pharmaceutical companies seeking to profit from drugs and medical staff on the frontline who worry that such profit-seeking does damage to patients needing treatment. (For what it’s worth, a competitor to Turing Pharmaceuticals announced soon after that it would produce a compound drug containing the same active ingredient in Daraprim – pyrimethamine – for $1 a pill, rather than the $750 Shkreli wanted to charge.)

One front in this battle has recently opened up in the US. In May, more than 40 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against some of the world’s biggest manufacturers of generic drugs, alleging they that have colluded to fix the price of more than a hundred medicines over a number of years. When prices should go down after a drug’s market exclusivity ended, the antitrust lawsuit claims that many prices have instead shot up – in some cases by more than 1,000 per cent.

And back in Europe, the consumer organisation Euroconsumers – of which Test Achats is part – is investigating the prices of other drugs beyond CDCA. “We’ve noticed a few problems with a few other drugs,” says Laura Marcus of Test Achats. “It’s often about drugs that are able to cure or deal with rare diseases. For sure, it’s not only CDCA.”

No one doubts that developing drugs costs money. A 2016 paper in the Journal of Health Economics estimated that the average cost of developing a prescription drug to the point of reaching the market is nearly $2.6 billion.

But the lack of hard, openly available statistics on the cost of drug development is something that many people, including Marcus and Marleen Kemper, want to change. “In most of the cases, society is willing to pay some price,” says Kemper, “but now the discussion is: what is an acceptable price?”

Marcus acknowledges that Leadiant has to cover its costs, but she thinks that cannot explain the rise of CDCA to over €150,000 – “the profit cannot be that high”. When I ask her how much profit she thought Leadiant was making from the drug, she admits she doesn’t know. “Of course we don’t have access to those numbers,” she says. “That’s what the Belgian Competition Authority is opening an inquiry for – to know more about the figures and the costs the company has to bear.” However, when the price for CDCA has surged from €500 to over €150,000, “nothing justifies it, because there was no new research, no new nothing,” she says.

Leadiant rejects this. Although CDCA had been authorised in the past, the company says that “the active pharmaceutical ingredient as well as the manufacturing of the finished product needed to be upgraded” to make sure that its version was compliant with current EU standards. These, Leadiant says, are more extensive and significantly more strict today than they were when earlier CDCA drugs were developed.

Leadiant says that its CDCA “is not a ‘copy’ of an old product”. The very fact that it gained orphan drug status proves this, it argues. The company also says that “there was no robust evidence that CDCA was effective in CTX until Leadiant produced the data”. Demonstrating this, it says, required “entirely new studies, creating new data sets” – which make up “the largest ever collection of clinical data for CTX”.

“CDCA Leadiant has been developed and brought to market at substantial cost,” the company says. “Our pricing is justified by our costs and investments.”

But the problem is not just that Leadiant’s drug is so expensive: potential alteratives have disappeared. Willemijn van der Wel, a lawyer working at European law firm AKD, has written about Leadiant’s connection to competitors who previously produced CDCA. After buying the marketing authorisations for other products that contained CDCA, he says, “Leadiant began to withdraw these alternative CDCA products from the market, until only one CDCA medicinal product remained”. Marcus has also queried what has happened to these products that might have been competitors to Leadiant’s. But, she says, it’s not clear what is behind their CDCA monopoly.

Leadiant, though, says that it’s willing to negotiate a lower price for its drug with the Dutch Ministry of Health and Dutch insurance companies. “The only reason an improvement has not been determined yet, is that the insurers have been uninterested or unwilling to enter into any substantive negotiations,” it claims. (Leadiant did not respond to follow-up questions asking for more details of the negotiations, or what level of price reduction the company was offering.) It also emphasises that it has not taken legal action against the UMC hospital for seeking to compound its own CDCA, but that it is “involved in a legal discussion with the Dutch Inspectorate about the interpretation of EU and Dutch medicines law”.

Regardless of the outcome of such discussions, something needs to be done. Having pharmacies self-compound medicines is not a sustainable model – it might reduce incentives for developing drugs for rare conditions.

It also, Leadiant argues, exposes patients to risk. Pharmacies do not have to have their compounding processes checked by the European Medicines Agency or the national regulator. “There is no product control by any independent regulatory authority before or after compounding.”

When it comes to market authorisation and orphan drugs, Leadiant says, “it should not be about small or large scale, but safe scale”.