‘Pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli, banned from pharma industry, launches medical chatbot

Martin Shkreli — who earned the nickname “pharma bro” after his pharmaceutical company dramatically increased the price of an older drug, was sentenced to seven years in prison for securities fraud in 2017 and banned from the pharmaceutical industry for life — has been busy since his release from jail last year. He has developed a virtual health care assistant.

In an April 20 blog post, Shkreli said his new chatbot, dubbed DrGupta.AI (the logo on the website highlights the letters G, P, and T), would be able to help patients “access health information and simulate interactions with a physician.” For $20 a month, users can send unlimited messages to the chatbot, which is now available.

In the post, Shkreli blamed high health care costs on physician decisions and argued that health care is more expensive due to a “constrained supply of health care professionals.”

Shkreli said large language models such as ChatGPT could be the solution. ”Dr. Gupta may not be ready to replace physicians entirely,” but has the potential to be a “valuable resource for many individuals,” Shkreli wrote.

DrGupta.AI, according to Shkreli, can interpret medical papers, textbooks or news articles. His invention comes with a warning that the bot is not providing actual medical advice: “Dr. Gupta IS NOT a real physician. Dr. Gupta is a GPT-based artificial intelligence chatbot intended to provide medical information as an alternative to a search engine. Dr. Gupta IS NOT intended for medical or clinical uses…”

“A large amount of health care information requests and decisions can be done by AI,” Shkreli wrote on Twitter, shortly before the social media platform suspended his account on Tuesday. “Years ago, I became the poster child for health care cost inflation,” he said on Twitter. “Pharma is only 12% of health care costs, but seems to get 90% of the blame.”

Related: ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli sued by FTC for ‘monopolizing’ drug

His “poster child” reference refers to US District Court Judge Denise Cote’s finding in January 2022: “In 2015, Martin Shkreli raised the price of the life-saving pharmaceutical Daraprim by 4,000% and initiated a scheme to block the entry of generic drug competition so that he could reap the profits.”

The judge banned Shkreli for life ”from directly or indirectly participating in any manner in the pharmaceutical industry” and fined him $64.6 million, penalties that his attorneys are still arguing to have reduced.