The pharmaceutical company behind Martin Shkreli's infamous 4,000 percent price hike—now known as Vyera Pharmaceuticals—filed for bankruptcy this week and plans to sell its assets to pay off millions in debts.

In court documents filed Wednesday, Vyera's chief restructuring officer, Lawrence Perkins, largely blamed Shkreli for dooming the company and its affiliates.

"Upon information and belief, Shkreli’s actions have caused serious reputational harm to [the companies] and have hampered [their] ability to, among other things, open certain bank accounts, successfully commercialize new products, and either raise capital or consummate the sale of various [company] assets," Perkins wrote in an affidavit.

Shkreli founded Vyera in 2014 under the name Turing Pharmaceuticals. His focus was to acquire sole-source drugs that treat life-threatening conditions in small populations of patients—and then dramatically jack up the price. In August 2015, he did just that, buying the rights to the decades-old anti-parasitic drug Daraprim for $55 million and abruptly raising the price from $17.60 per tablet to $750, a more than 4,000 percent increase. He protected the price hike with several allegedly anti-competitive measures, including blocking generic competitors from obtaining the active ingredient, pyrimethamine, which they needed to obtain regulatory certification and enter the market.

Advertisement

The scheme was only somewhat disrupted when, in December 2015, Shkreli was indicted on securities fraud charges. Federal prosecutors accused him of running a Ponzi-like scheme that involved two hedge funds he previously managed and another pharmaceutical company he founded, called Retrophin. He was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to seven years in prison but kept directing the Daraprim work at Turing from behind bars using a contraband cell phone.

Shkreli's influence wasn't shaken until January 2020, when the Federal Trade Commission and several state attorneys general sued Shkreli and the company—then called Vyera—for allegedly violating antitrust laws. Soon after, Vyera appointed a new board and management to purge ties to Shkreli. Vyera later settled the FTC's lawsuit, while Shkreli insisted on going to trial, where he lost, was banned from the pharmaceutical industry for life, and ordered to pay roughly $65 million in disgorgement. He is appealing the ruling.

Meanwhile, Vyera never reversed Shkreli's price hike. From 2016 to 2019, the company grossed between $55 million and $74 million from Daraprim, which brought in average net prices of between $228.00 and $305.00 per tablet after rebates and coupons. Starting in 2020, several generics hit the market—which still go for hundreds of dollars a tablet after coupons—cutting into Vyera's profits. The company's net sales reached just $21.2 million in 2021 and $9.5 million in 2022. So far in 2023, the net sales reached just $1.35 million, and Vyera reports a net income loss of $6.3 million.

The company's "current cash balances are insufficient to fund the operations of [the companies] and pay liquidated and unliquidated claims against them," Perkins told the bankruptcy court. On top of that, the company also faces several lawsuits.