Chairman Collins, Ranking Member McCaskill to Hold Second Hearing in Senate Aging Committee’s Bipartisan Investigation:

Interim CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Ronald Tilles, to Appear

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Senate Aging Committee Chairman Susan Collins and Ranking Member Claire McCaskill will hold a hearing TOMORROW, Thursday, March 17, titled: Sudden Price Spikes in Decades-Old Rx Drugs: Inside the Monopoly Business Model. It is the second hearing in their ongoing bipartisan investigation.

The Senate Special Committee on Aging held the first in a series of hearings in response to the sudden, aggressive price spikes of decades-old Rx drugs in December 2015.   From the beginning, the bipartisan investigation has focused on four pharmaceutical companies—Turing Pharmaceuticals, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Retrophin, Inc., and Rodelis Therapeutics—that operate more like hedge funds than traditional pharmaceutical companies.

Tomorrow’s hearing will take an in-depth look inside two of these hedge fund pharmaceutical companies, Turing and Retrophin, both formerly headed by Martin Shkreli, who gained notoriety last year for dramatically increasing the price of the drug Daraprim.  Together, these two companies have produced some 400,000 pages of documents in response to Committee subpoenas. 

Through their bipartisan investigation, the Committee has uncovered the monopoly business model these companies use to identify and strategically acquire drugs that they can then exploit at the expense of patients, health care providers, private insurance plans, and federal health care programs. 

The witnesses for tomorrow’s hearing will include:

Panel I:

Howard Dorfman, former Senior Vice Present and General Counsel, Turing Pharmaceuticals, New York, New York 

Adaora Adimora, M.D., M.P.H., Professor of Medicine, School of Medicine; Professor of Epidemiology, Gillings School of Public Health, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Shannon Weston and Joshua Weston, parents of infant born with Toxoplasmosis, Whispering Pines, North Carolina 

Panel II:

Ronald Tilles, Interim CEO, and Chairman of the Board, Turing Pharmaceuticals, New York, New York

Michael Smith, Co-Founder and Senior Director of Business Development, Turing Pharmaceuticals, New York, New York

Dan Wichman, Partner and Analyst, Broadfin Capital, New York, New York                        

WHERE:        Room 562, Dirksen Senate Office Building
                    Washington, D.C.
 
WHEN:         TOMORROW, Thursday, March 17, 2016
                    9:45 AM