imagine for a moment popping a pill before bed that costs about 1350 cents now imagine waking up the next morning find that the price of the exact same pill jumped to 750 dollars overnight that is just what happened to one drug meg Tyrell joining us now with that story and the man who was behind at price spike Meg thank you Brian and Martin shkreli joins us now from the Nasdaq he's a CEO of turing pharmaceuticals Martin thank you for joining us thanks for having me now you guys have said that the reason you increase this price so much after acquiring the drug was in order to do the research and development to develop a better version of daraprim I just got off the phone with an HIV doctor who told me they don't need a better version of this drug what are you doing here yeah that's not true there's a recent paper that's just that two patients died due to autoimmune encephalitis from toxoplasmosis so there's a lot of people who died toxoplasmosis every year that and this field desperately needs new ways to treat ox and plasmosis for instance the current drugs right now target target folate receptor of the bog there's no other way to take to kill toxoplasmosis as as of right now so we're working hard on trying to find you ways to do that so what a lot of companies do is raise venture capital funding when they see an important market for a drug rather than raising the price on the current patients who need it to survive and who have no other choice but to take it and pay the higher price why wouldn't you go that route well we did raise one of the largest series a financing is in history for a biotech company raised over 90 million dollars and we also feel that this is the more appropriate price for daraprim at this price daraprim is still actually on the low end of what orphan drugs cost and we're certainly not the first company to raise drug prices so Hillary Clinton comes out today citing the story about you guys in the New York Times causing quite a stir in the biotech industry did you not expect a 5,000 percent price increase would result in that kind of attention maybe maybe not I mean it really depends on how focused people want to be on the industry you know at the end of the day there have been much larger drug price increases by much bigger drug companies that actually you would argue large multi-billion dollar companies with lots of cash don't necessarily need to do something at this attorney because a very small company it's a new company and we're not a profitable company so for us to try to exist and maintain a profit I think it's pretty reasonable most biotech companies don't actually maintain a profit for decades until they get drugs onto the market why are you guys different well I think of us as pharmaceutical company not necessarily a biotechnology company and I think that distinction is not exactly clear either way but I think profits are a great thing to stain your corporate existence Martin you mentioned that you're a small company and you're gonna use the price increase the difference to do our deed to find a better cure for toxoplasmosis what kind of R&D staff do you have what sort of what amount of money do you plan on on devoting to research and develop development sure so so we have about 25 people in R&D and we have open positions for another 25 we do medicinal chemistry and VEVO and vitro from ecology I help the team out quite a bit so I'm really excited to develop new drugs for for toxoplasmosis we're gonna contribute the majority of our revenue to doing that so in essence we're taking the revenue from daraprim and trying to come up with better safer more effective version of it and you were a hedge fund manager before yes you probably could have guessed as Megan mentioned that this is gonna cause a stir and we actually saw the IV be the biotech index ETF go down about 5% on Hillary's tweet did you anticipate that that would happen are you in any way invested in biotech there sure either personally or another fund I have a small portfolio but I don't really watch the stock market on a day-to-day basis so does that mean that your do you have it any physician in biotech stocks or any of them yeah I'm sort of few biotech stocks but I'm also long if we biotech stocks and you know I don't have a specific net short interest in biotech or anything Martin I gotta ask you doctors have come out saying that you guys need to revise your pricing strategy because patients can't get access to these drugs this HIV doc I just spoke with said they're trying to hoard it in order to provide it do you feel badly about what's happening no in fact we're increasing access to patients mag I think that you know we're we're dramatically increasing the access daraprim lowering co-pays giving more drug away for free half of the drug we give away is for one dollar so I'm not sure what you're talking about you know Martin when you bought the company this was a $1 pill before Core labs bought it then I went to 1350 now you bought it now goes to over seven hundred would you bought when you bought this company did you buy it because you knew that you could raise the price we definitely plan on raising the price that's for sure we paid a very very large amount by an unprofitable medicine we can't continue to make to lose money on the drug at that price so we took it to a price where we can make a comfortable profit but not any kind of ridiculous profit there much your honor but your if I assume you are a free markets gentleman are you not sure okay so why do you think that why do you think the drug was priced at 1350 before somebody thought that was the right price for this drug market the markets and thirteen and a half worked yeah if you look at drugs like sovaldi for instance daraprim is less expensive than sovaldi despite the fact that treats a disease that's far more severe and far less common so if you think about free markets and fair price it's it's pretty clear that you know daraprim was not price appropriate was there from actually cure toxoplasmosis it does it does it one thing there's a finite and just like for the appetite to see drug it's in fact a very short treatment administration which makes it even less expensive than most orphan drugs what you have to take for years and years and years can you imagine taking a drug that costs five hundred thousand dollars for the rest of your life every single year for by comparison a cure a cure treatment of daraprim is about fifty thousand dollars so it's about half the price of Hep C cure regimens right now Martin we do appreciate you comment I gotta ask you one more question you in response to all of this attention and doctors and patient groups saying they can't access this drug are you gonna change the price no hey YouTube fans I'm Landon Downey from CNBC thanks so much for checking out our channel here you'll find videos packed with all the info that you need to be smarter about your finances be sure and 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