text: Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Turing Pharmaceuticals boss Martin Shkreli had previously defended the price riise 
   
   Judging by social media, Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, may be the most hated man in America right now. 
   
   He's been called a "morally bankrupt sociopath", a "scumbag" a "garbage monster" and "everything that is wrong with capitalism." And those are some of the tamer comments. 
   
   So how did a rap music-loving, former hedge fund manager suddenly become the target of online ridicule and even death threats? 
   
   His company recently acquired the rights to Daraprim. Developed in the 1950s, the drug is the best treatment for a relatively rare parasitic infection called toxoplasmosis. People with weakened immune systems, such as Aids patients, have come to rely on the drug, which until recently cost about $13.50 (£8.80) a dose. 
   
   But Mr Shkreli announced he was raising the price to $750 a pill. The more than 5,000% increase and his brash defence of the decision has made him a pariah among patients-rights groups, politicians and hundreds of Twitter users. 
   
   Other drugs companies have made similar moves raising the price of niche products, but few have so publicly and so unapologetically answered critics. 
   
   The backlash became so pitched on Tuesday that Mr Shkreli agreed to lower the price of Daraprim to an "affordable level". 
   
   Image copyright Twitter Image caption Martin Shkreli, seen here in an August Twitter post, has aggressively answered critics 
   
   Humble beginnings 
   
   Martin Shkreli, the son of Albanian and Croatian immigrants, grew up in a working-class community in Brooklyn, New York. He skipped several grades in school and received a degree in business from New York's Baruch College in 2004. 
   
   At 17, he began his first internship at Cramer Berkowitz & Co, the hedge fund founded by television personality Jim Cramer. 
   
   In 2006, Mr Shkreli started his own hedge fund, Elea Capital Management. 
   
   The fund closed a year later after a $2.3m lawsuit from Lehman Brothers, which collapsed before it could collect on the ruling. 
   
   After Elea, Mr Shkreli started MSMB Capital Management in 2008. The fund would be his launch pad for founding biotech firms including Turing. 
   
   Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Shkreli moved into the pharmaceutical industry after working as a hedge fund manager 
   
   A rocky start in pharmaceuticals 
   
   Turing was not Mr Shkreli's first foray into the pharmaceutical industry. In 2011, he founded biotech firm Retrophin, with the goal of focusing on medicines for rare diseases. 
   
   He was ousted as head of the company in 2014 amidst allegations he improperly handled legal settlements. 
   
   A year later the company filed a $65m lawsuit that claimed Mr Shkreli created Retrophin and took it public simply to pay off investors in his old hedge fund, MSMB when the fund went under. 
   
   Mr Shkreli has denied the accusations. "They are sort of concocting this wild and crazy and unlikely story to swindle me out of the money," he told the New York Times. 
   
   On August 4, 2017, a jury found Mr Shkreli guilty of three of eight counts, including securities fraud, in a criminal case brought by US prosecutors. But they cleared him of allegations that he had looted Retrophin to make payments for the hedge funds. The civil suit brought by Retrophin remained pending as of 4 August. 
   
   Image caption Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the rights to Daraprim in August 
   
   A second chance 
   
   Turing Pharmaceuticals was launched in February 2015 after Mr Shkreli was forced out of Retrophin. 
   
   The business claims its goal is to focus on treatments for serious diseases for which there are limited options. "We are dedicated to helping patients, who often have no effective treatment options," a statement on Turing's website said. 
   
   The company only has two products on the market Daraprim and Vecamyl, which treats hypertension. 
   
   Mr Shkreli has argued the Daraprim price increase was warranted because the drug is highly specialised; he likened the Daraprim to an Aston Martin previously being sold at the price of a bicycle. The additional profits he said will be used to make improvements to the 62-year-old drug recipe. 
   
   Image copyright Twitter Image caption One of Shkreli's first tweets about the Dramaprim controversy 
   
   Mr Shkreli did not take the criticism of his company's actions lightly. 
   
   On Sunday, he sent out a hostile tweet accusing the media of singling him out. "And it seems like the media immediately points a finger at me. So I point one back at em, but not the index or pinkie," he wrote, quoting an Eminem song. 
   
   His tone later softened following several TV interviews where he claimed the profits of the drug would be used to create a better product. 
   
   All of the negative attention may have finally had an effect on Mr Shkreli. 
   
   His Twitter account, which had sparred with critics for days, went dark and then Mr Shkreli agreed to lower the price. 
   
   "We've agreed to lower the price on Daraprim to a point that is more affordable and is able to allow the company to make a profit, but a very small profit," he told ABC News. "We think these changes will be welcomed." ||||| America is outraged — outraged! — that Turing Pharmaceuticals hiked the cost of a drug called Daraprim by 5,000% last month. (The drug is used to fight infections in patients suffering from AIDS and other conditions.) 
   
   What took everyone so long? 
   
   Turing CEO Martin Shkreli is a repeat moral offender. He pulled off similar price hikes at his previous company, before getting fired and sued for $65 million. 
   
   But there's a much bigger problem than Shkreli here: The skyrocketing cost of generic drugs. It's nothing new. And it hadn't gotten much attention until this week, partly because most pharma companies aren't run by evil executives who happily explain they're making a profit by over-charging AIDS patients. 
   
   Here's an incredible sentence from an ABC News report from this past May — on three other generic drugs that have seen their prices skyrocket in the past year. 
   
   The cost of the generic blood pressure medication captopril jumped more than 2,700 percent, the asthma drug albuterol sulfate went up more than 3,400 percent and the antibiotic doxycycline jumped a whopping 6,300 percent, according to National Average Drug Acquisition Cost (NADAC) statistics. 
   
   One 49-year-old patient suffering from a painful condition called endometriosis said the cost of her treatment had grown 6,500% between 2010 and 2015. She now spends about $115 per day on a generic painkiller called fentanyl citrate, which is forcing her to deplete her retirement savings. 
   
   "I realized if I wanted to keep my job and my life, I was going to have to find a way to pay for this," she told ABC News. "I started taking money out of my IRA, and that’s how we had to pay for it." 
   
   There's a mix of reasons for these soaring prices, but the most important factor is that companies like Turing are cornering the market on certain generic drugs, and then using their near-monopoly power to hike prices. 
   
   So why doesn't another firm try and compete, especially given that the patent on a drug like Daraprim has lapsed? Well, maybe 10,000 people use Daraprim every year. And as Sarah Kliff wisely reports for Vox, there isn't enough market demand for these generic drugs to motivate a new competitor to enter the field. 
   
   And given the relatively small numbers of people affected by each of these drug hikes, there hasn't been much attention on the issue — even though the National Community Pharmacists Association has flagged dozens of generic drugs that have seen their costs similarly skyrocket in the past year. 
   
   The Daraprim scandal exploded this week for several reasons. An odious pharma executive straight out of central casting. Hillary Clinton's speech, further calling attention to the problem. And — by Google News' count — more than 3,600 articles dedicated to the controversy. 
   
   But the Daraprim scandal is now over. Two days after the story detonated in the pages of the New York Times, Turing Pharmaceuticals will dramatically reduce its planned price hike to Daraprim, Shkreli told NBC News on Tuesday night. He didn't make clear what the new price would be, only that it would be lowered to a level for Turing to make a "small profit." 
   
   The real trick wasn't getting Turing Pharmaceuticals to back down. The sheer weight of the news cycle did that this week. 
   
   (By Tuesday morning, the news about Turing and Shkreli was even trending around the world. "¿Por qué este hombre es el más odiado de internet?" asked writers at Sopitas.com, a Mexican website.) 
   
   The hard part is achieving lasting reform. And no one agrees on how to do that. 
   
   Take Hillary Clinton's new proposal to reform the prescription drug industry, which was hailed by her supporters but panned by some policy experts. 
   
   Harvard's Amitabh Chandra tells the New York Times that Clinton's proposal to force pharma companies to reinvest profits into R&D is "astonishingly naïve"; there's no evidence that pharma firms aren't doing enough research, and pushing them to spend more upfront would seem to do little to lower the actual costs of drugs. Meanwhile at Forbes, Avik Roy contends that Clinton's plan would actually lower the incentive for new companies to enter the market, by reducing the patent life on innovative drugs. 
   
   Instead, the most promising solution is probably pushing on regulators, not singling out pharma companies. Writing in the NEJM last year, Jonathan Alpern and coauthors suggested that FDA needed to dramatically speed up its process to encourage new generic manufacturers; the agency on average needs 10 months just to process a new application to produce a drug. 
   
   "[W]e believe that special pathways should be created to promote competition and permit the private market to function more efficiently," Alpern and his coauthors wrote. 
   
   Getting FDA to change its regulations is a slow process. There won't be any TV-ready villains; just rounds of public comment and dry testimony. And the rules won't be fixed by a few days of negative headlines. 
   
   But if you care about this issue — if you're offended by what Turing tried to do to Daraprim — remember your outrage. Keep it close. You'll need it for the long slog to come in the months ahead. 
   
   -- 
   
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target: – The drug company CEO called the "most hated man in America right now" by the BBC says he's misunderstood—but that he'll lower the price of Daraprim in response to the firestorm of criticism. "There were mistakes made with respect to helping people understand why we took this action," Turing Pharmaceuticals chief Martin Shkreli, who raised the price of the toxoplasmosis drug from $13.50 a pill to $750, tells NBC News. "I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people." The 32-year-old former hedge fund boss says it's "very easy to see a large drug price increase and say, 'Gosh, those people must be gouging,'" but that drug pricing is "very hard stuff" for people to understand. Shkreli admits that the drug is cheap to make, but he says the price has to cover "the quality control, the regulatory costs, and all of the other things that come with having a drug company." Shkreli is an "odious pharma executive straight out of central casting," but his company is far from the only one buying up relatively obscure drugs and massively increasing the price, writes Dan Diamond at Forbes. The same thing has happened to dozens of other drugs over the last year, and while media attention forced Shkreli to back down, "the hard part is achieving lasting reform," he writes. (A huge increase in the price of a tuberculosis drug has also been rolled back.)