Patients fear spike in price of old drugs

New York

FRED Kellerman, a retired car salesman from Los Angeles, was bedridden with a rare neuromuscular disease when he started taking a drug in the 1990s at Duke University in North Carolina. It changed his life.

"I had to have a wheelchair to get onto the airplane, but by the time I left, I could walk on," he said.

Mr Kellerman has been using the drug ever since, paying nothing but postage. In an unusual act of charity, a small family-run drug company in Plainsboro, New Jersey, has been giving it away. The drug was never formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but was provided under an obscure federal drug provision.

But one company's generosity is another's opportunity. Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, a Wall Street-traded company, last week completed an application to the FDA for formal approval of a slightly modified version of the drug that does not need refrigeration. In a presentation to investors last spring, Catalyst estimated that it could make US$300 million to US$900 million a year from the drug, named Firdapse, that could eventually benefit as many as 8,000 patients. …