Martin Shkreli, the former pharmaceutical executive nicknamed "big pharma bro", has congratulated a group of Australian high school students who managed to cook a drug in their school laboratory that his company sells for more than $1000 a tablet.
The efforts of the Sydney Grammar School students should be recognised because the students were "proof that the 21st century economy will solve problems of human suffering through science and technology", Mr Shkreli, 33, said in a short video message posted on YouTube on Friday.
"We should congratulate these students for their interest in chemistry and all be excited about what is to come in the stem-focussed 21st century," he said.
In September last year, Mr Shkreli's company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, gained the rights to Daraprim, an anti-parasitic medication listed by the World Health Organisation as essential.
In a move that attracted widespread outrage, Mr Shkreli soon raised the price from $US13.50 to $US750 a dose.
Mr Shkreli said the price rise was to extract money from insurance companies to fund research for better drugs.
But for his efforts, he was variously called "a morally bankrupt sociopath", a "scumbag" and "everything that is wrong with capitalism".
Under the guidance of Dr Alice Williamson at the University of Sydney, the year 11 Sydney Grammar students made the drug for about $2 a dose as part of a science experiment.
Soon after Fairfax Media published the story this week, people on Twitter started peppering Mr Shkreli with questions about the story.
On Twitter, he initially laughed off suggestions that the school students had shown him up, before recording a video statement in which he said he was "delighted to hear about more and more students entering the stem field".
"Not long ago I was an enterprising young scientist student," he said in the 54-second video.
He said he was proud to hear recently that a kidney diseases clinical trial he started at New York University when he was 28 had "hit its primary end-point for the first ever registration trial", and that the first medicine he invented, for a fatal genetic disease, would soon be entering pivotal clinical trials.
"Medical science has brought tremendous advances in cancer, mental health, auto-immune disorders and many others.
"Technology has lowered the costs of a myriad of goods and services dramatically," he said.
I made a short statement on the Australian students: https://t.co/cSQo3jHZoFYou can also watch recording chemistry lessons on my channel!— Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) December 1, 2016
