Mark Cuban’s online pharma aims to slash medicine prices

People looking for less expensive alternatives to high-cost prescription medications now have a new and maybe surprising option.

Mark Cuban, a billionaire businessman, Shark Tank star, and owner of the US basketball team Dallas Mavericks, launched the online drugstore Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, reports PBS.

His new direct-to-consumer company, Cost Plus Drugs for short, sells more than 100 generic pharmaceuticals at low prices.

"The goal is to be the low-cost provider for all drugs, period, end of story," Cuban told CNN earlier this month.

"As an entrepreneur, anytime I see an industry that's been run the same way for decades, if not generations, and it's been obfuscated to the point where there's no transparency, and you have associations trying to protect that opaqueness, to me that's an opportunity. And that's exactly what we saw with the prescription drug industry," he told PBS in an exclusive interview.

"And by adding transparency and our approach a cost plus drugs, which is we'll show you our actual cost, we'll mark it up 15 percent, we'll add $3 pharmacy handling fee and $5 shipping, and that's all you ever pay. That's simplification and transparency has really had an impact."

"The one industry where people say every minute of every day, 'we need lower prices' – this is it. We'll just have that very singular mission. You're not going to see us add bells and whistles," Mark Cuban said.

The anti-parasite drug albendazole, has been reduced from $438 to $33 per dose; the leukemia "miracle drug" imatinib (the generic form of Gleevec), has been reduced from $9,657 for a month's supply of 400mg pills to $47.10; and the muscle relaxer cyclobenzaprine, has been reduced from $1,094 for a month's supply of 30mg capsules to $5 by Cost Plus Drugs, reports The Independent UK.