Tag Archives: drug company legal news

Drug companies want to dismiss Ohio’s lawsuit over opioid epidemic

CHILLICOTHE, Ohio – Companies that make prescription opioids want a Ross County Common Pleas judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine that charged them with stoking Ohio’s opioid epidemic by fraudulently marketing their products.

Legal briefs filed by Purdue Pharma, which makes Oxycontin, say U.S. Food and Drug Administration requirements for its products preempt Ohio law, and DeWine’s lawsuit also failed to prove the company’s actions caused the harm he cites.

“The State does not identify a single physician who prescribed one of Purdue’s opioid medications to any patient when it was allegedly medically unnecessary, much less, a physician who did so because of Purdue’s allegedly misleading marketing or promotional materials,” the company’s legal filings say.

Read Full – http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2017/09/drug_companies_want_to_dismiss.html

Ohio attorney general sues 5 pharmaceutical companies over opioid epidemic


The Ohio attorney general has filed a lawsuit against five leading prescription opioid manufacturers, alleging that the companies intentionally misled patients regarding the risks and benefits of opioid use with fraudulent marketing.

Attorney General Mike DeWine accused the companies of leading patients to believe that opioids were not addictive, which the lawsuit says fueled the current opioid epidemic in Ohio.

“We believe the evidence will also show that these companies got thousands and thousands of Ohioans — our friends, our family members, our co-workers, our kids — addicted to opioid pain medications, which has all too often led to use of the cheaper alternatives of heroin and synthetic opioids,” DeWine said in a statement. “These drug manufacturers led prescribers to believe that opioids were not addictive, that addiction was an easy thing to overcome, or that addiction could actually be treated by taking even more opioids.”

The five manufacturers listed in the lawsuit, filed in the Ross County Court of Common Pleas, are Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and its subsidiary Cephalon, Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Allergan.

The lawsuit was filed in Ross County since Southern Ohio was the area hit the hardest by the opioid epidemic, the press release states. A record of 3,050 people in Ohio died from drug overdose in 2015, The Associated Press reported. That figure is expected to rise significantly once the 2016 figures have been tallied, according to the AP.

The lawsuit alleges that the drug companies violated the Ohio Consumer Sales Practices Act and created a “public nuisance by disseminating false and misleading statements about the risks and benefits of opioids.”

Full Read – http://abcnews.go.com/US/ohio-attorney-general-sues-pharmaceutical-companies-opioid-epidemic/story?id=47750198

Sanofi Files Suit Against Merck, Claiming Patent Infringements

French drugs firm takes legal steps to prevent the launch of rival versions of its diabetes treatment

A packet of diabetes drug Lantus SoloStar on the production line at a manufacturing site of French drugmaker Sanofi in Frankfurt, Germany. The French company has filed a lawsuit against U.S. peer Merck & Co. to prevent it from launching a rival version of its diabetes treatment. PHOTO: REUTERS

PARIS— Sanofi SA said it filed a lawsuit against Merck & Co. for alleged patent infringements to prevent the U.S. drugmaker from launching a rival version of the French pharmaceutical giant’s best-selling diabetes treatment Lantus.

In the filing in the U.S. District Court of Delaware, Sanofi said on Monday it claims that Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., Merck & Co.’s international division, violated as many as 10 patents held by the French company, including ones for its insulin Lantus and its insulin delivery device soloSTAR.

The Paris-based drugs company said it started the legal proceedings against Merck after the U.S. firm’s filing for new drugs applications with the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

A spokeswoman for Merck said the company’s product “doesn’t infringe Sanofi’s patents.”

Sanofi shares were 1.3% higher at €69.91 in midday trading.

The French drugmaker’s all-important diabetes business is under siege, as a flurry of pharmaceutical companies seek to sell knockoffs of its blockbuster insulin Lantus in the U.S. The expected launch of lower-cost copies of Lantus and growing pricing pressure on diabetes drugs in the U.S. is rapidly eroding earnings at Sanofi’s diabetes division, which accounts for about 20% of the firm’s total revenue.

In the first six months of the year, diabetes revenue fell by 6% to €2.9 billion ($3.2 billion), hit by a 15% drop in Lantus sales to €2.38 billion. The company has said it expects revenue from diabetes drugs to continue to decline this as competition among insulin makers intensifies.

In January 2014, Sanofi filed a suit against Eli Lilly & Co. to defend its patents on Lantus. It had reached a deal with the U.S. drugmaker nearly two years later, under which Lilly agreed to delay the launch of its insulin to December 2016 and pay royalties to Sanofi.

In a bid to replenish its new drugs pipeline and revive growth, Sanofifor months had pursued U.S. biotech Medivation—a Nasdaq-listed company that focuses on hard-to-treat cancers, markets one prostate-cancer therapy, Xtandi, and has two other oncology assets in clinical development.

But U.S. pharma giant Pfizer Inc. beat out Sanofi grabbing Medivation for $14 billion in August.

Sourced From  – http://www.wsj.com/articles/sanofi-files-suit-against-merck-on-patent-infringements-1474285467

Has Charitable Giving Become A Profitable Form Of Investing For Pharmaceutical Companies?

Martin Shkreli, the notorious ex-CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, made waves last summer when he purchased the rights to Daraprim and raised its price more than 5,000 percent. Physicians use the drug to treat toxoplasmosis, a life-threatening condition that affects those with weakened immune systems (due to HIV/AIDS, etc.).

Days after Shkreli’s purchase, he contacted Patient Services Inc., a charity committed to making medical care more affordable. Shkreli wanted to create a fund for – you guessed it – patients who suffer from toxoplasmosis.

Patient Services Inc., or PSI, jumped at the opportunity, suggesting an initial donation of $22 million, including $1.6 million of its operational costs. Shkreli countered with an offer of $1 million and $80,000 of the company’s costs. This was a paltry offer, considering that Daraprim now costs $60,000 to $90,000 for six-week treatment in light of Shkreli’s price hike.

And that isn’t the worst of it.

Finding A Loophole

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PSI is a copay charity, one of seven large ones in the U.S. health care system. It exists to offer payment assistance to the 40 million Americans who qualify for Medicare, helping them to a smaller copay and smaller up-front costs. Even with the help of copay charities, Medicare recipients were still paying around $3,000 for their Daraprim prescriptions.

American taxpayers shoulder the difference. This is where the controversy of “charitable giving” comes into play. By donating a paltry $1 million to a copay charity, Shkreli was able to collect millions more from Medicare, thanks to his own drug price hike. “Big pharma” benefits, while taxpayers and patients suffer.

The Great Charitable Giving Illusion

Many pharmaceutical companies give the illusion that they participate in charity copay for altruistic reasons. Congress recently released an internal case study of Turing Pharmaceuticals, suggesting that its patient payment programs should be “repeatedly referenced” to promote public relations. Experts explain that giving millions to these copay charities makes pharmaceutical companies look altruistic, when the opposite is actually true.

The real intent of these donations is often to deflect criticism when they hike drug prices, leaving the health care system to pick up the broken pieces.

A History Of Deceit

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Daraprim may be the most high-profile example of this charitable funding phenomenon, but it’s certainly not the first. Retrophin, another drug company run by the now-infamous Shkreli, hiked the price on Thiola, a drug intended to treat recurring kidney stones, nearly 2,000 percent. At the same time, his company gave a donation to PSI for kidney stone patient copays.

Read Full Article – https://www.summitbehavioralhealth.com/blog/charitable-giving-profitable-investing-pharmaceutical-companies/

Big Pharma Promotes Legal Drug Addiction

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Big Pharma Promotes Legal Drug Addiction

Many of us believe that Big Pharma must be held accountable for this dangerous opioid trend, especially since several have been caught lying about the benefits and risks of their drugs.

As noted by the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), the drug industry has “fostered the opioid addiction epidemic” in several ways, by:

  1. Introducing long-acting opioid painkillers like OxyContin, which prior to reformulation in 2010 could be snorted or shot. Many addicts claimed the high from OxyContin was better than heroin. In fact, from a chemical standpoint, OxyContin is nearly identical to heroin, and has been identified as a major gateway drug to heroin.
  2. Changing pain prescription guidelines to make opioids the first choice for lower back and other pain conditions that previously did not qualify for these types of drugs. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) has had a hand in this problem, although it restricted its promotion of narcotic painkillers to cancer patients.
  3. Promoting long-term use of opioids, even though there’s no evidence that using these drugs long term is safe and effective
  4. Downplaying and misinforming doctors and patients about the addictive nature of opioid drugs. OxyContin, for example, became a blockbuster drug mainly through misleading claims, which Purdue Pharma knew were false from the start. The basic promise was that it provided pain relief for a full 12 hours, twice as long as generic drugs, giving patients “smooth and sustained pain control all day and all night.”However, for many the effects do not last anywhere near 12 hours, and once the drug wears off, painful withdrawal symptoms set in, including body aches, nausea and anxiety. These symptoms, in addition to the return of the original pain, quickly begin to feed the cycle of addiction.7

A 2015 article in The Week does a great job revealing the promotional strategy developed by Purdue, and backed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), that has led to such enormous personal tragedy.

As noted in this article: “The time-release conceit even worked on the FDA, which stated that ‘Delayed absorption, as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.’”

Other recent research has found that medical marijuana lowers prescription drug use.

The Big Q: Could that be why it hasn’t been rescheduled?

There are no other truly compelling reasons why addictive narcotics like OxyContin are legal, while marijuana, which is extremely unlikely to kill even if one take very high amounts is not.

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Read Full Article – http://www.livetradingnews.com/big-pharma-promotes-legal-drug-addiction-10406.html#.V6F8KZMrKRs