{"id":3723,"date":"2016-12-01T15:42:11","date_gmt":"2016-12-01T14:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3723"},"modified":"2016-12-01T15:44:33","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T14:44:33","slug":"newsflash-counterfeit-goods-are-cheap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/3723\/","title":{"rendered":"Newsflash: Counterfeit Goods are Cheap!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Either I am being dense, or the BBC<\/a>\u00a0is:<\/p>\n

\n

The man who sparked outrage last year by hiking the price of a life-saving drug may have met his match in some Australian schoolboys.<\/p>\n

US executive Martin Shkreli became a symbol of greed when he raised the price of a tablet of Daraprim from $13.50 (\u00a311) to $750.<\/p>\n

Now, Sydney school students have recreated the drug’s key ingredient for just $20.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

The Sydney Grammar boys, all 17, synthesised the active ingredient, pyrimethamine, in their school science laboratory.<\/p>\n

“It wasn’t terribly hard but that’s really the point, I think, because we’re high school students,” one boy, Charles Jameson, told the BBC.<\/p>\n

The students produced 3.7 grams of pyrimethamine for $20. In the US, the same quantity would cost up to $110,000.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The issue was never how expensive\u00a0it is to make the drug, it was who held the license to make it and sell it in the US.<\/p>\n

Mr Shkreli, also known as “Pharma Bro”, was chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals when it acquired exclusive rights to Daraprim.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clearly some people don’t realise this:<\/p>\n

Dr Alice Williamson, a University of Sydney research chemist, supported the boys’ project through online platform Open Source Malaria.<\/p>\n

“They’ve transformed starter material that’s worth pennies into something that has a real monetary value in the States,” she told the BBC.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No, their product has no monetary value in the States. \u00a0Let them try to sell it over there and\u00a0see what happens.<\/p>\n

“If you can obtain it cheaply in schools, then there’s no excuse for charging that much money for a drug. Especially from people that really need it and probably can’t afford to pay for it.”<\/p>\n

Dr Williamson called the pricing in the US “ludicrous”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We\u00a0have a chemist working in research at a university who thinks the price of drugs is driven by the cost of the ingredients, and shit turned out in a school lab is the same as that certified for distribution in the US by the FDA.<\/p>\n

Next up from the BBC: Chinese students\u00a0make a Louis Vuitton bag for $10, undercutting the flagship\u00a0store on the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es by $490. \u00a0Praise all ’round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Either I am being dense, or the BBC\u00a0is: The man who sparked outrage last year by hiking the price of a life-saving drug may have met his match in some Australian schoolboys. US executive Martin Shkreli became a symbol of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,60],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3723"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3723"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3726,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3723\/revisions\/3726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}