The short story of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s May 19 opinion in Recor Medical Inc. v. Medtronic Ireland is that the lower court got it wrong when it ruled Medtronic lacked the required standing to bring an infringement countersuit against Recor because it had granted an exclusive license for products covered by the two asserted patents. The case was reversed and remanded.
Eli Lilly and Co. lost its bid to have the U.S. Supreme Court strike down the whistleblower provisions in the False Claims Act (FCA) as unconstitutional.
It’s back to the drawing board for the U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). After a year of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy gutting the panel and restocking it mostly with people who share his views on vaccines, the CDC published a notice in the May 19 Federal Register saying it’s withdrawing the amended ACIP charter renewal issued April 6 and is instead “re-establishing” the committee.
It looks like the end of the road for many of the court challenges to the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) provision requiring Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. The U.S. Supreme Court denied cert May 18 to petitions brought by six biopharma companies that raised questions about the constitutionality of the negotiations. All but one of the suits involved were denied in the Third Circuit; the other one was denied in the Second Circuit, so there is no circuit split – yet.
Temperature matters when determining pH levels. Whether that level should be measured at a standard room temperature or refrigerated matters even more, at least in Actelion Ltd.’s infringement litigation against Mylan Inc. According to Johnson & Johnson’s Actelion, the pH level in epoprostenol, the key ingredient in its hypertension drug Veletri, should be measured at a refrigerated temperature when it comes to Mylan’s generic formulation.
The U.S. SEC filed a settlement April 29 that it reached with Anthony Cataldo regarding allegations that the former chairman and CEO of a clinical-stage biopharma company misappropriated about $3.2 million from the company and then concealed the misconduct from the company’s auditors.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has appealed a recent federal ruling that put on hold several changes to the childhood vaccine schedule and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices as reconstituted by HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy.
More than five years after pleading guilty to its role in the opioid epidemic, Purdue Pharma LP was sentenced in federal court and ordered to pay $5 billion in criminal penalties.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma Inc. could either discourage the development of generic drugs under a skinny label or make innovators think long and hard about investing hundreds of millions of dollars in developing new indications for drugs already on the market.
Ever since Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. sued Eli Lilly and Co. several years ago, claiming Lilly’s migraine drug, Emgality (galcanezumab), infringed its headache treatment patents, the two companies have been on a litigation rollercoaster.