Thursday, September 09, 2010

en banc CA2 denies rehearing in Bayer/Teva CIPRO settlement

The Hill noted on 9 Sept 2010:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied a full hearing in the case of a patent settlement concerning the antibiotic drug Cipro.

The Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA) said the decision provides "a clear sign that the FTC's [Federal Trade Commission] position that patent settlements are anti-competitive, anti-consumer is fatally flawed."


Reuters had written:

On April 29, a three-judge panel in New York upheld a lower court's ruling dismissing objections to Bayer AG paying Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Inc's Barr Laboratories to prevent it from bringing to market a version of the anthrax drug Cipro.

But the panel invited further review by the full nine-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which published an order Tuesday denying the rehearing.


There is commentary by Daniel Fisher which includes the text:

The case captures the conflict between patents — a constitutionally mandated process for giving inventors monopolies — and antitrust laws, which are designed to protect consumers against price gouging.

One notes that the Constitution empowers Congress to set up a patent system; it does not mandate one. Inventors are given a right to exclude, not a monopoly.

Of Hatch-Waxman, Fisher writes:

The whole controversy arises from the Hatch-Waxman Act, a 1984 law in which Congress cleverly shoved the question of whether generics could compete with entrenched patentholders in front of the courts.

Meanwhile, in the area of pancreatic cancer, consider work by Infinity on the Hedgehog pathway [The Hedgehog pathway contains two cell-membrane proteins, Patched (Ptc) and Smoothened (Smo), that are regulated by the absence or presence of Hedgehog ligand. Smoothened plays a critical role in the malignant activation of the Hedgehog pathway. }

1 Comments:

Blogger New said...

While I'm somewhat surprised by the Second Circuit's decision not to rehear the case en banc, I am looking forward to (potentially) having the Supreme Court weigh in on pay-for-delay in patent litigation. This case seems like prime SCOTUS material. If the Court does review the case, however, I find it rather unlikely that it would disregard the FTC's longtime hostility to pay-for-delay agreements; and the government's position tends to carry substantial weight with the SCOTUS. But then again, you never know.

5:05 PM  

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