persondude27

he raised prices because he needed the profit in order for his company to invest (exclusively) in R&D, which is by nature not profitable. his company is seeking to improve daraprim which is 60 something years old and has terrible side effects for patients

I work on the outskirts of Big Pharma (clinical drug trials). They pay our bills.

Shkreli is every bit the tool that he was portrayed in the media. He made a lot of claims that demonstrated that he was in the industry exclusively to milk money of out the product. My favorite was when he claimed that he was going to remove the negative side effects of the drug (Daraprim).

Daraprim fights Toxoplasma gondii (parasite) infections. It works by inhibiting folic acid, so the bug can't do DNA/RNA synthesis. They eventually die out. The side effects of Daraprim are from folic acid shortness.

Shkreli claimed that he raised the price to invest in R&D of the same product and that they were researching how to fix the symptoms. This is NOT the way a pharma company would operate, because it would involve building a whole new drug. You would have to find a whole new mechanism and therefore a whole new patent. Literally, he would have to start the whole process anew and that's not what his company does. They buy and sell rights, not do multi-billion dollar research projects.

He was literally just price gouging and knew so little about the drug that he trapped himself in a lie.

The other two points are marketing. I'm sure that he will help anyone get the drug who can't afford it, because hospitals will mostly give the drug first and ask questions, including billing, later. Plus, the guy's public image could use any flotation it can get.

Wow! Congrats on the new album. Loving it!

What's it feel like to write a song, and then hear someone else's take on it? What it's like to have someone ascribe their own meaning to something that you built?

Similarly, what's it like to play a venue like Red Rocks and hear 9,500 people singing your music back to you?