Daraprim is the life-saving drug used to treat malaria and toxoplasmosis that made headlines last year after Martin Shkreli bought the rights to it and hiked the price by 5,000 percent from $13.50 to $750 per pill.
After the news came out that a bunch of 16 and 17 year-olds had recreated the active ingredient, pyrimethamine, and created their own version of the pill for just $2, adding that it 'wasn't terribly hard', there were reports that Shkreli was pretty pissed off.
However, he then took to Twitter to put his side across:
OK, so he claims not to be pissed off, but those tweets are definitely boarding on a rant, right? Of course, they can't compete with him, they are school kids, not billionaire pharmaceutical company owners. I think he's missing the point, tbh.
Now the students have responded to his comments by calling him an 'attention-seeking businessman' who 'forgets that there are people's lives and livelihoods at stake.'
Speaking to the Guardian one of the students involved in the project, Leonard Milan said: "Saying to us that anyone could do what we could do is certainly true.
"If you follow his overpriced method using toxic chemicals in an industrial lab it's easy. But the fact that we were able to substitute some really toxic gasses with simple school-available chemicals and do it so cheaply demonstrates the absurdity of some of his justifications for the price.
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"Whilst there are mitigating factors, namely the percentage of returns he puts back into research and development, I think he has made it a personal matter. If he were to get 'pushed around' by schoolkids, it'd be a bad look."
They also said they don't care what Shkreli thinks, because being involved with the project gave them a passion for science.
Featured image credit: PA
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