Mark Cuban’s New Pharmacy Might Save You Thousands
And updates on Omicron, contraceptives, and insomnia treatments
COVID-19 Updates
This week looks promising for lower cases. However, we are likely to see the death rate continue to rise. Additionally, it is important to note that not all parts of the US have reached their omicron peaks. Many regions are lagging behind the urban centers like New York.
A quick science aside, researchers in Boston have begun tracking the population's viral load of COVID-19 by measuring samples of sewage. This allowed them to know when the case counts were peaking and about to dip before the actual numbers came out.
Turns out, you can learn a lot about what the public is consuming by studying their poop. The second episode of the docuseries Connected, available on Netflix, shows you all the miraculous ways poop can be studied in science, including detecting how many people used illegal drugs over a weekend in London. Awfully similar to the science used to detect how many have COVID…
Mark Cuban Launches Discount Online Pharmacy
On Jan 19, Shark Tank billionaire Mark Cuban’s drug company launched its own online pharmacy, costplusdrugs.com. The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company (MCCPDC) claims to offer discount drug pricing through a transparent business model. By cutting out certain middlemen, MCCPDC offers drugs at-cost with a flat 15% fee and $8 in shipping.
What does it look like?
Cost Plus provides real and significant discounts on generic drugs. According to MCCPDC, the leukemia drug imatinib has a retail price of $9,657 a month but is usually bought with a coupon that reduces its price to $120. At just $47 a month, Cost Plus beats the lowest price on the market while eliminating the confusion surrounding vouchers and rebates.
Cost Plus provides similar savings for each of the 100 generic drugs in its initial inventory. While the pharmacy is cash-only and does not accept insurance payments, its prices are still often lower than what patients might pay with insurance at a typical pharmacy. For those without insurance, Cost Plus may be the cheapest option to acquire a prescription drug.
In 2015, Martin Shkreli infamously acquired the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim, raising its price from $13.50 to $750. While Shkreli attracted worldwide criticism, Cost Plus CEO Alex Oshymansky was inspired by the incident to found the company in 2018, then known as Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals. Cost Plus aims to serve multiple functions, including those of manufacturer, distributor, pharmacy benefit manager, and online pharmacy, to bring drugs direct-to-consumer at low costs. Since then, the company has attracted Mark Cuban as an investor, who has the resources and seeming ambition to take on the drug industry. “I could make a fortune from this,” Cuban said to Texas Monthly. “But I won’t. I’ve got enough money. I’d rather f— up the drug industry in every way possible.”
Check out:
Texas Monthly profile of the company
New pharmacy launch
Contraceptive Coverage Under Scrutiny
Health insurance providers are being investigated for skirting Affordable Care Act (ACA) rules on ensuring compatible birth control access, which may be causing the rise in unintended pregnancy rates in the US. ACA rules essentially state that every health insurance must cover, without cost sharing, at least one birth control method of each of the 18 types of birth control methods the FDA has classified. No cost sharing means that patients don’t have copays for these birth control methods.
However, this has resulted in certain birth control products in each category having much more coverage than others. The covered methods may not be the best in their category or even the most compatible with the patient.
For example, one of the most recent FDA approved contraceptives is a patch called Twirla and it is manufactured by Agile. The patch uses less estrogen than competing patches and has much better adhesive qualities allowing it to be just as effective as current patches on the market but with fewer side effects. Insurers do cover this new product, but with cost sharing. Their justification? That they cover a different patch already without cost sharing.
In this way, insurances could be choosing the cheapest contraceptives to cover without cost sharing and use cost-sharing models on all of the best ones. These are among several other allegations for which they might be investigated.
A New Insomnia Treatment!
The FDA recently granted approval to the Swiss drug maker Idorsia for their new treatment for insomnia.
In this case and many similar ones, drugs are often targeted towards treating the symptom instead of the disease itself. Current treatments of insomnia include the use of sedatives, which is a very untargeted approach to treating the disease, and they lead to several side effects like day time drowsiness, and are known to be addictive.
The new drug, called Quviviq, has a more targeted approach and specifically blocks a signaling molecule called orexin by inhibiting the receptors that orexin normally binds to. This reduces wakefulness in the patient and in a way, causes them to sleep. Notice that while sedatives work by putting a conscious person to sleep, Quviviq tries to block the signal that causes wakefulness in the first place.
How this works is not completely understood but the clinical trials for the drug showed good efficacy and were conducted on a large sample group of more than 600 patients. Like many other drugs that we have previously covered, diseases which are not completely understood often see the use of drugs whose mechanism of action isn’t completely understood either. Doctors just use it because they see that it works and it is rather effective.
Overall the approval of Quviviq gives insomnia patients another potential remedy for their disease, while it does not completely cure the disease, it can offer some relief until the disease is better understood and a better treatment can be made as a result.
For a brief overview of what insomnia is, watch our short here:
Featured Fake News: Viagra Doesn’t Cure COVID
The claim that it does originates from rumors about a British woman who was given Viagra by her doctor to help her treat COVID. The fake news rumor mill has researched the active ingredient of Viagra and noticed that it can help expand or dilate blood vessels. They took this to mean that it would increase the size of the blood vessels in the lungs allowing COVID patients to get more oxygen.
You can imagine where the rumors went next. We won’t be going there today though because these claims are FALSE.
The idea of using Viagra or its active ingredient Sidenefil to treat respiratory failure goes back nearly 30 years according to Dr. Daniel Culver, a pulmonologist and director of the Interstitial Lung Disease Program at Cleveland Clinic. The idea has never been supported by any clinical evidence.
So don’t take Viagra if you test positive. Unless you need to for other reasons! Just not for COVID. We may not be virologists here but we’re pretty sure viruses don’t care for that stuff…
Thank you for reading! If you are not already subscribed, we would appreciate if you would subscribe using the button below.