Outraged by what they considered the unethical, immoral, inherently evil pricing model Turing Pharmaceuticals AG used last year when it acquired a 63-year-old orphan drug and then jacked its price nearly 5,500 percent, several members of the Senate Special Committee on Aging called the New York company a rogue biopharma player. But at least one senator saw Turing as representative of the entire industry.

The business model – followed by hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli at start-ups Retrophin Inc. and then Turing – involves acquiring a low-priced, sole-sourced drug for a rare condition, providing it through a closed distribution system and then jacking the price as high as possible.

In the case of Daraprim (pyrimethamine), which has been used since 1953 as the gold standard to treat toxoplasmosis, Turing raised the price from $13.50 a pill to $750, putting it out of reach of many patients who needed it to survive. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 30, 2016.)

“Because the patient populations for these drugs are so small, they are not only unattractive to potential generics manufacturers, but they are also usually not an important or even desirable part of a traditional pharmaceutical company’s portfolio,” Ranking Member Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said Thursday in opening comments at the committee’s second hearing to investigate drug pricing.

“So, traditional pharmaceutical companies are generally happy to sell these drugs to others when a good offer comes along,” McCaskill continued. “This makes these drugs (and therefore their patient populations) vulnerable to being poached by a relatively new breed of pharmaceutical companies whose primary goal is to reap extraordinary profits, and who do not hesitate to pursue that goal despite risking patient access and people’s lives.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) refused to let the rest of the industry off the hook. “This happens again and again,” she said, noting that Novartis AG raised the price of cancer drug Gleevec (imatinib) from $26,400 a year to about $120,000 and that Amgen Inc. has increased the price of arthritis drug Enbrel (etanercept) by 88 percent over the past five years. Such increases show that the biopharmaceutical industry is not working for the patients, she added.

Outlier or not, Turing’s actions likely will have repercussions for all of biopharma. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) cited clear market failures that allowed Turing to engage in “mischievous, monopolistic or exorbitant pricing strategies.” While Congress doesn’t want to interfere in the free operation of the market, Whitehouse said if the market isn’t working, lawmakers need to intervene.

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