You remember Martin Shkreli. He rocketed to notoriety three years ago when the company he ran, Turing Pharmaceuticals, bought an old anti-infective drug used by AIDS patients and quickly boosted the price of a tablet to $750 from $13.55. He was widely derided by the pharmaceutical industry as an outlier, although many other companies have regularly trafficked in such maneuvers.
A new analysis, however, suggests these moves are even more common than imagined.
A group of researchers examined a few dozen older drugs that no longer had patent protection but had changed hands, and they found the median price more than doubled after acquisition.
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