High Schoolers Recreate Big Pharma’s $750 Drug ‘Daraprim’ For Only $2

20140507132310-1_title_bvhookLast year, hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli had his company Turing Pharmaceuticals purchase the rights to anti-parasitic drug Daraprim, and immediately jacked the price up 5,000 percent, from $13.50 a pill to an astonishing $750. It was widely viewed as a quintessential example of Big Pharma price gouging.

Now, a group of Australian 11th graders has developed a new technique to make the drug’s active ingredient in their high school chemistry lab for the equivalent of just $2 a pill.