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Jerome Zeldis remembers exactly how he felt when he heard about the $84,000 price tag on a powerful new hepatitis C treatment three years ago.
“I was somewhere between annoyed and outraged,” recalled Zeldis, the former chief medical officer of the biotech juggernaut Celgene.
The cost of a 12-week course of Gilead Sciences’ drug Sovaldi triggered fierce pushback from insurers, politicians and the public, and helped spark a national debate on high drug prices.
As a physician, Zeldis had cared for hundreds of patients infected with hepatitis C and seen how, untreated, the virus ravaged people’s livers. That a high price could bar patients from easy access to a cure seemed unethical to him in the face of a rare public health opportunity to vanquish a disease that afflicts 150 million people globally.
“If we make it affordable . . . this epidemic can be cured,” Zeldis said. “I want to be bold — I want to treat 100 million people by 2030 – end of story. And there is really no reason why we can’t.”
Zeldis had been mulling hepatitis C therapies, and he believed it was possible to develop a medicine, sell it for a fraction of the price of Sovaldi and still make money.
So in 2014, Zeldis put $1 million of his own money on the table to co-found Trek Therapeutics, a startup with the mission of creating a novel, affordable hepatitis C treatment for the world.
To attempt to produce an effective and safe treatment at a modest price, Zeldis and his co-founder, Ann Kwong, had to blow up the typical drug company model. The reality of the pharmaceutical industry is that executives answer to investors, not just patients. Creating new medicines is a high-risk, high-reward business in which companies invest huge amounts of money on uncertain payoffs. Shareholders demand extremely high profits in return.
Trek is taking a unique approach. The company is organized as a public benefit corporation – a relatively new type of corporate structure that places public welfare on equal footing with profit. Trek’s legal charter requires the board to weigh stockholder interests against the need to “provide therapies for the treatment of infectious diseases that are accessible and affordable.”
Read the rest of this very interesting article here: http://www.courant.com/business/ct-drug-price-solution-trek-20161104-story.html