Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co. considered selling insulin but found the price doubled with shipping costs, CEO and co-founder Alex Oshmyansky, MD, PhD, said June 13 at the AHIP conference.
In December, Cost Plus Drugs said it was "evaluating a future insulin test program" and seeking consumer feedback.
"If we offered a 90-day supply of a fast-acting insulin (up to 12 vials/8 packs of pens) for $170 incl. shipping, what would you think?" the company tweeted.
After numerous drugmakers lowered their insulin prices to $35 for a month's supply, Dr. Oshmyansky said the company realized it "didn't quite make sense" to sell insulin.
"We were working on bringing in an insulin product to the market for quite some time," he said at the conference. "We did actually bring one to the market, we did it as sort of a closed beta pilot to see what consumer response would be. But ultimately, direct to consumer mail-order it was $35 for a month's supply but $65 for the shipping and handling. It didn't quite make sense within our model. We almost viewed it as a solved problem from the consumer perspective at this point. You know, almost everyone has access to $35 insulin in one form or another now."