A US drugmaker is charging almost $300 for a bottle of prescription vitamins that can be bought online for less than $5, in the latest attempt at price gouging in the world’s largest healthcare market.

Avondale Pharmaceuticals raised the price of Niacor, a prescription-only version of niacin, by 809 per cent last month, taking a bottle of 100 tablets from $32.46 to $295, according to figures seen by the Financial Times, writes David Crow for the Financial Times.

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Although niacin, a type of vitamin B3, is available in over-the-counter forms for less than $5 per 100 tablets, some doctors still prefer to use the version approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat high cholesterol.

Avondale, a secretive Alabama-based company, put the price of Niacor up shortly after acquiring the rights to the medicine in a so-called “buy-and-raise” deal — a strategy made famous by Martin Shkreli, the disgraced biotech entrepreneur.

It bought the medicine from Upsher Smith, a division of Japan’s Sawai Pharmaceutical, this year, although neither the transaction nor its terms has been announced by the companies.

Buy-and-raise deals involve acquiring a drug that faces little or no competition before sharply increasing the price in an attempt to profit from inefficiencies in the US healthcare market, where the cost of medicines is not controlled by the government.

The increases were confirmed by Truven Health Analyticsand Elsevier, which both maintain a database of drug prices.

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