Martin Shkreli anticipated huge profits from raising the price of a decades-old drug for infectious disease, belying any notion that helping patients was foremost in his mind, according to information released by congressional investigators on Tuesday.  The investigators also provided evidence showing that Valeant Pharmaceuticals International carefully pondered how much it could raise the price of two old heart drugs, Isuprel and Nitropress, before buying them a year ago and increasing their prices overnight, by 525 percent for Isuprel and 212 percent for Nitropress.  Mr. Shkreli practically gloated about the potential profits in an email he sent last August, just after his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, had paid $55 million to acquire the drug Daraprim, and had raised its price more than fiftyfold to $750 a pill, or $75,000 for a bottle of 100.  “So 5,000 paying bottles at the new price is $375,000,000 — almost all of it is profit and I think we will get three years of that or more,’’ Mr. Shkreli wrote in the email to someone the congressional staff identified only as an outside contact. “Should be a very handsome investment for all of us. Let’s all cross our fingers that the estimates are accurate.’’  The email excerpt is included in a memo released by Representative Elijah E. Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in advance of a committee hearing on Thursday about drug price increases.  Mr. Shkreli left Turing after he was indicted on securities fraud charges in December. He was subpoenaed to appear as a witness but has said he will invoke his Fifth Amendment right and not answer questions.  He has hired a new lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, replacing the lawyers at Arnold & Porter, a major Washington firm.  Mr. Brafman is a seasoned New York criminal defense lawyer who has specialized in representing prominent defendants, including celebrities and members of organized crime families. His clients have included Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund; the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, known variously as Puff Daddy, Diddy and P. Diddy; and the pop star Michael Jackson.  The memo released by Mr. Cummings contained excerpts and conclusions gleaned by Democratic staff members from more than 250,000 pages of documents provided by Turing. A separate memo about Valeant was based on 75,000 pages of documents from that company, whose interim chief executive, Howard B. Schiller, is expected to testify at Thursday’s hearing.  The committee did not release all the documents or even the entire text of the emails that were quoted.  Turing said in a statement on Tuesday that it set the drug price to “balance patient access to our existing drugs with investment in research and value generation for our shareholders.’’ It said that in November — months after it set off public outrage for its price increase — it began offering discounts of up to 50 percent to hospitals that use large amounts of Daraprim.  Valeant said in a statement on Tuesday that it was now offering discounts of up to 30 percent to hospitals on Isuprel and Nitropress. “We’ve heard from hospitals, as well as from Congress, that we set the price for these two drugs too high,’’ it said.  Mr. Shkreli, 32, gained attention in September after the huge overnight increase in the price of Daraprim, a six-decade-old drug that is the standard of care for toxoplasmosis, a serious parasitic infection.  Mr. Shkreli has argued that Daraprim was such a small-selling drug that the price increase would not affect the health care system, and that the company would help with co-payments and take other steps to make sure that no patient would be denied the drug. He said the money from the price increase would go toward research on new drugs, and Turing is doing some such research.  But some of the documents released by congressional investigators show some patients were being hit with co-payments as high as $16,800, and others of $6,000, and Turing was receiving protest from doctors.  The documents also show Turing executives anticipated at least $200 million in annual revenue from Daraprim and were focused on the profits. Last Sept. 17, Tina Ghorban, senior director of business analytics and customer insights, forwarded a single purchase order for 96 bottles of Daraprim at the full price. “Another $7.2 million. Pow!” she wrote.  One email to a commercial loan company in September said Turing was considering going public in the first quarter of 2016 and acquiring another drug, this time from Teva, that was “also going to be a big price-increase deal with good upside.’’  Regarding Valeant, the Democratic staff memo says the company identified the revenue goals for Isuprel and Nitropress and raised the prices to reach those goals. Before buying the two drugs in February 2015, the company hired a pricing consultant who concluded that there was ample room to raise the price because previous big price increases had not damped use.  One internal presentation showed that the goal for 2015 was for revenue of $279.3 million for Isuprel, up from $54.5 million in 2014 under the previous owner. The goal for Nitropress was $245.5 million, up from $98.7 million in 2014. The explanation for the big revenue increases was “aggressive pricing through consultant recommendation.’’
Documents released by a congressional panel show that Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Turing Pharmaceuticals, Mr. Shkreli’s former company, sometimes raised prices as much as fiftyfold.