Interesting thought, is it ethically sound to openly clone this drug and make a generic or is that as bad as hiking up the price?
> Mulye also noted that rival pharmaceutical company Casper Pharma raised the price of its brand-name version of nitrofurantoin, called Furadantin. Casper hiked the price by 182 percent over three years—between 2015 and 2018—bringing a bottle’s list price to $2,800.
There’s no ethical issue at all. It’s a purely a business issue of whether the market is worth competing in as a new supplier.
But this particular change is more complex. First, the manufacturer is producing an oral suspension, which is substantially more expensive than equivalent generic tablet formations. Second, the price increase seems to have come about due to a shortage in supply, in turn due to unspecified "new rules on impurities from the FDA".
So I guess there's some argument that a limited number of suppliers in the market has pushed up the cost. But the drug is still 3-4 times more expensive than the equivalent oral formulation in the UK, so the definite impression here is "absolutely shameful price-gouging".