Dive Brief:
- San Diego-headquartered Imprimis announced it would cut 8% of its workforce and close a Texas facility in order to save $3 million in annual costs. The restructing will cost around $600,000.
- Imprimis is exploring alternatives for the use of the Texas site, but has given no further details at this time.
- This move follows investments into the company's New Jersey facility, including new production processes in filling and labeling automation. The facility will be registered with the FDA as a 503B outsourcing facility this year.
Dive Insight:
Imprimis has been bucking the trend of price gouging by offering lower priced alternatives to drugs produced by headline-hitting companies like Turing Pharmaceuticals. Rather than focusing on generic forms, Imprimis uses drug compounding to create preparations to the specific strength and dosage requested by the prescriber, which it describes as "pioneering a new commercial pathway in the pharmaceutical industry."
This approach can be used to provide alternatives to generics, when these are not yet approved, or where generics companies have shown no interest in the specific drugs. Compounders do need to watch their backs though. The FDA keeps close oversight, with powers granted under the Drug Quality and Security Act of 2013 following a 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak.
So far, Imprimis has rolled out a delayed-release alternative to Thiola (tiopronin), a kidney stone treatment from Shkreli's old company Retrophin, which had its price increased from $1.50 per tablet up to $30 per tablet.
Imprimis has also produced a 99 cent alternative to Daraprim (pyrimethamine), the drug which Shkreli infamously increased the price of by 5,000%. Express Scripts has arranged with Imprimis for the Daraprim alternative to be available to patients.
Imprimis is developing a compounder version of Mylan's EpiPen as well — another company recently in the news for its high price tags. The compounder predicts that this will cost approximately $100, significantly less than the $600 for a pair of the branded devices, and lower than the $300 for Mylan's newly announced generic form.