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SYDNEY, Dec. 5 (Xinhua) -- A group of high school students who synthesised the active ingredient of a life-saving drug is creating waves in the community for highlighting how cheaply medicine can be made.
The 17-year-old students from Sydney Grammar School re-created the key part of Daraprim, an anti-parasitic drug used to treat patients with weak immune systems, including those with HIV/Aids, for a fraction of the selling price.
Last year, the price of the drug in the US rose from a little over 10 U.S. dollars to more than 700 U.S. dollars when Turing Pharmaceuticals and then chief executive Martin Shkreli acquired the drug's rights and raised its price.
"Basically in terms of what the students made, the amount that they made, this compound is about 100,000 Australian dollars' (74,500 U.S. dollars) worth of the active ingredient if it were in tablet; and they probably made that from about 20 dollars' worth of starting material," Dr Alice Williamson, a research chemist, lecturer and science communicator at The University of Sydney, told Xinhua.
"We think, based on what they did, it probably costs about 2 dollars to make enough ingredient for one pill," said Williamson, who supported the boys' project via Open Source Malaria, an online research-sharing platform, after they embarked on their work at the beginning of the year.
In most countries, including Australia, Daraprim is sold for between 1 Australian dollar to 2 Australian dollars a pill, according to local media reports.
"We still think that there's lots of conversations we need to have about the morality and legality of charging so much for a medicine," Williamson said.
"The boys' story, what's captured people's attention, is that lots of people don't understand why this medicine is so expensive; lots of people didn't understand that the actual active part is very cheap to make, whereas I think they do now."
