The Foundation for Financial Journalism (https://ffj-online.org/tag/insys-therapeutics/)
Executives at Insys Therapeutics have continued to pressure its employees to develop new ways to mislead insurance companies into granting coverage to patients prescribed its drug Subsys, even as the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations is issuing a stream of subpoenas to former employees.
The Insys that investors loved and that made its founder and chairman John Kapoor a billionaire is going away and, despite heroic efforts by company officials to rebrand it as a research and development-driven shop, its future will probably be less profitable, with little of the mercurial growth and compounding profits that defined its first four years.
Insys Therapeutics is a company in a great deal of trouble. Starting late last year critical press reports detailed alleged business practices at Insys so aggressive as to make the company an outlier in the oft-sanctioned pharmaceutical industry.
Slowly but surely answers to the many riddles of how Insys Therapeutics could achieve its mercurial success are beginning to emerge.
On the evening of July 1, 2014, Carolyn “Suzy” Markland, a 58-year-old Jacksonville, Florida, resident with a degenerative disc disease, took her prescribed medicine — a 400-microgram dose of a Fentanyl spray called Subsys — and went straight to bed.