Solvadi/sofosbuvir was discovered by Pharmasset, Schinazi and Liotta's lab, which Gilead picked up for a cool $11 billion a few years ago. I believe sofosbuvir

Solvadi/sofosbuvir was discovered by Pharmasset, Schinazi and Liotta's lab, which Gilead picked up for a cool $11 billion a few years ago. I believe sofosbuvir was Pharmasset's main IP (I think they had some HIV treatments -- S&I's wheelhouse from their time at Emory -- in the investigational stage, but Hep C was their big product.) There are a couple of things to consider about this. The first is that there are a lot of HCV treatments expected to come online over the next few years, so Gilead has an incentive to jack up the price now while they're the only game in town -- and with $11b in acquisition costs, they need to make their nut back on this. Second, only a very small number of HCV patients are in high-income countries. 6.4% of all HCV victims are in US, EU and Japan, but Egypt alone has up to three times as many HCV patients as the US. (Anyone wanting to go to Egypt for cheap HCV therapy might think twice; poor infection control practices in Egypt's health care system has been implicated as the primary source of HCV infection.) With HCV raging through so many poor countries, it's reasonable to at least discuss subsidizing global access to medications by increasing the rate paid for treatment courses in wealthy countries. The alternative would be direct financial support of global access which, given the current political climate in developed nations, is unlikely to get much traction. I'm certainly not saying that Gilead is operating with humanity's best interests in mind -- few industries are as brutally venal as pharm -- but it seems to me that the tradeoff is something that is at least worth discussing.