Posts Tagged: "Watson Pharmaceuticals"

FTC charges Endo Pharmaceuticals with antitrust violations for pay for delay patent settlements

The FTC’s complaint alleges that Endo paid the first generic companies that filed for FDA approval – Impax Laboratories, Inc. and Watson Laboratories, Inc. – to eliminate the risk of competition for Opana ER and Lidoderm, in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act. The FTC is asking the district court to declare that the defendants’ conduct violates the antitrust laws, and further seeking an order that the companies disgorge their ill-gotten gains. Of course, the FTC asks for a permanent bar to prevent the companies from engaging in similar anticompetitive behavior in the future.

Companies Agree to Sell Rights to 18 Drugs to Satisfy FTC

The Federal Trade Commission will require Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Actavis Inc. to sell the rights and assets to 18 drugs to Sandoz International GmbH and Par Pharmaceuticals, Inc, and relinquish the manufacturing and marketing rights to three others, to settle charges that Watson’s proposed $5.9 billion acquisition of Actavis would otherwise be anticompetitive.

FTC Seeks SCOTUS Review in AndroGel “Pay-for-Delay” Case

At the request of the Federal Trade Commission, the Solicitor General of the United States petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review a recent federal appeals court ruling concerning the FTC’s case against a “pay-for-delay” agreement. The petition for certiorari, the mechanism for asking for the Supreme Court to review a case, argues that the agreement that postponed generic competition for the testosterone-replacement drug AndroGel is anti-competitive and should not be legal. But thanks to the byzantine legal rules created by the Hatch-Waxman Act, the brand name owner was doing nothing more than what seems to explicitly be authorized by the law.