Dr. Alex Oshmyansky, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, made the announcement Monday during a White House forum on reducing healthcare costs. The company will start producing its pharmaceuticals in Texas this week.
“With advanced robotic and AI computer vision technology, Cost Plus Drugs is proudly bringing pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the U.S.,” Oshmyansky stated. That enables us to switch from producing one kind of medication to another extremely quickly—in theory, within four hours.
“That way, we can begin production of the product that is currently in short supply.”
Oshmyansky and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban founded the company in January 2022. They will initially produce commercial batches of epinephrine (used in EpiPens) and norepinephrine (used to raise and maintain blood pressure) for intensive care unit patients in hospitals. Production of these two medications will start “this week,” according to Oshmyansky, who did not specify when pediatric oncology treatments will be produced. “Shortly after” are therapies for other types of cancer.
The availability of chemotherapy for a child should never be a concern for any parent, according to Oshmyansky. “In 2024, the United States simply does not have the common, affordable medications that everyone needs, and no one should go without the lifesaving intensive care unit medications they require or have to delay their surgery because of it.”
Originally scheduled for completion in late 2022, Cost Plus Drugs’ 22,000-square-foot pharmaceutical factory is located in Dallas’s Deep Ellum district. According to Oshmyansky, the cutting out of intermediaries during drug production is just as crucial as the medicines themselves.
Discussing pharmaceutical intermediaries in a White House roundtable
At Monday afternoon’s White House roundtable, everyone was talking about PBMs or intermediary pharmacy benefit managers. Among the public and private figures present were Cuban, Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, and Sandra Clarke, the chief operating officer of Blue Shield of California.
According to Cuban, PBMs have been engaging in practices that exploit vulnerable patients and prioritize stock price over health, such as “shitting on independent pharmacies.”
Cuban emphasized that the foundation of Cost Plus Drugs is the ease of purchasing medications and selling them directly to customers at affordable, transparent prices. To offer as many pharmaceuticals as is legally feasible, the online retailer currently has 2,500 in stock.
Cost Plus Drugs will be transparent about its manufacturing costs, just like it is about the prescriptions it presently offers, according to Oshmyansky, who noted that PBMs collaborate with pharmaceutical wholesalers to establish so-called source programs that control 90% of the medication purchasing in the US.
In this approach, Oshmyansky argued, “We are profitable and sustainable, but never extortionate.”
