FTC Tells “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli He Can’t Be In Industry

Everyone’s favorite poster child for the money-grabbing ways of the pharmaceutical industry, Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli has been working on the angles since he tiptoed out of prison last May Year. He’s been bringing potshots into the tech industry via some sort of “crypto-based drug discovery platform” and he’s made a scene telling criminally accused crypto brothers that “Prison isn’t that bad.”

But his attempt to regain the attention of the drug industry could bite him in the arse, as a federal agency wants the courts to hold him accountable for violating an injunction that says he will never, ever work in the drug industry again.

On Friday the Federal Trade Commission asked a federal judge Scorning Shkreli in court and saying the Pharma Bro didn’t give the agency the information it needed to determine if he was trying to re-enter the pharmaceutical industry.

Back in 2015, Shkreli’s pharmaceutical company Turing (later renamed Vyera) bought the rights to the drug Daraprim, that is to treat people living with HIV and AIDS. The buyout meant the drug was pulled off pharmacy shelves. Shkreli then increased the price of the drug by 5,000%, from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill.

in one release, the FTC said Shkreli ignored the agency’s request for compliance reports and interview requests. FTC Competition Bureau chief Holly Vedova said the agency stands ready to “deploy the full extent of its agencies to facilitate a full investigation.”

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Although both state and federal institutions have complained Ex-CEO Shkreli has never been charged for his plan to inflate the prices of the life-saving drug Daraprim. Instead, federal prosecutors charged him with securities fraud unrelated to the Daraprim controversy. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and was fined $7.4 million (although, of course, he was paroled after just four years). In 2020, the FTC sued Vyera for violating antitrust laws for attempting to block generic competition for the drug. In the resulting settlement, Vyera was forced to pay consumers $40 million in relief over 10 years. In early 2022, a federal court judge in Manhattan also found Shkreli liable in the antitrust lawsuit and permanently barred him from working “directly or indirectly” with himin the pharmaceutical industry. He was also scheduled to pay a $64.6 million fine.

Shkreli has been out of prison for almost a year, and he’s been trying ever since Co-founder of Druglike, a company that wanted to “democratize” drug research through the use of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Unfortunately for Shkreli, unknown actors allegedly hacked the account that holds all the crypto tokens that the company wanted to use.

The FTC, citing Druglike in its court documents, said it requested information about the company but received nothing back by the multiple November and December deadlines. The agency mentioned that the former pharma exec had promised to email documents complaining that there were “too many”.

New York-based attorney Brianne Murphy is listed in the FTC lawsuit as Shkreli’s youngest attorney. In a phone interview, Murphy told us that while she is not representing Shkreli on the matter of the FTC order, she plans to “quickly resolve the misunderstanding.” Providing the additional information requested.

Murphy added that because Druglike is a “software company, not a pharmaceutical company,” they don’t think Druglike violated FTC rules.

Although the FTC may disagree with this alleged nomenclature. Court documents indicate that Shkreli and Druglike have discussed how they will disrupt drug companies with their product. A line quoted directly from the the company’s first press release read, “We will disrupt the economics of the drug business by allowing a broad pool of innovators and contributors, rather than just pharma giants, to benefit from drug discovery.”