The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) sued AbbVie and Besins Healthcare, co-owners of a patent that covered brand AndroGel, in 2017. The FTC claimed that the manufacturers had brought “sham” patent infringement litigation in...more
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the US House of Representatives’ Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee recently voted three bills out of committee that target the pharmaceutical industry practices of so-called “reverse...more
On February 3, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") and the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") issued a joint statement and plan seeking to advance biosimilar competition and combat deceptive and anticompetitive...more
On February 3, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a joint statement announcing their plans to collaborate in promoting competitive biological product markets and...more
On October 7, 2019, California became the first state to enact legislation—Assembly Bill 824 ("AB 824")—rendering certain pharmaceutical patent litigation settlement agreements presumptively anticompetitive. This alert...more
On 12 December 2018, the General Court (“Court”) partially annulled the European Commission’s decision of 9 July 2014 in the Servier case and consequently reduced Servier’s fine by more than 30%, from €330.99 million to...more
This past year has seen renewed challenges to reverse payment settlement agreements in the pharmaceutical industry. Since the Supreme Court’s Actavis decision in mid-2013, potentially anti-competitive agreements are...more
Antitrust - FTC Announces Revised Hart-Scott-Rodino Thresholds for Acquisitions and Exclusive Licenses - The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced this year's revisions to the thresholds under the...more
On November 21, 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld a 2014 jury verdict for AstraZeneca (AZ) and Ranbaxy regarding a 2012 payment of $700 million from AstraZeneca for Ranbaxy to abandon its challenge...more
On November 7, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review an appeal from a Third Circuit decision finding that a settlement between GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Teva) involving the...more
It has been over three years since the Supreme Court’s Actavis decision. Since then, numerous putative class actions alleging harm to competition as a result of “reverse-payment” settlements have flooded the courts. The...more
One of the least disputed elements of class certification is Rule 23(a)(1) numerosity, and so there is relatively little analysis from the courts about it. Last month, however, a divided panel of the Third Circuit provided a...more
Direct and indirect purchasers of Nexium recently appealed District of Massachusetts Judge William Young’s denial of a request for a new trial in In re: Nexium to the First Circuit. As we previously reported, In re: Nexium...more
On November 17, 2015, the FTC submitted an amicus brief to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in In re Effexor XR Antitrust Litigation, where the district court had dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims of antitrust violations...more
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. triggered a flurry of judicial activity in relation to pharmaceutical patent settlements allegedly involving reverse payments from patent...more
In recent years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has refocused its efforts on the interplay between the patent system and antitrust law, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. While most of this focus has manifested...more