The holidays are looking brighter for Masimo Corp. with two bits of good cheer this week for the company. Apple Inc. confirmed to BioWorld that it will preemptively pull two smartwatches from its website and retailers in response to a Masimo infringement case that persuaded the International Trade Commission to block their import.
After years of battling to retain its hold on Grail Inc., Illumina Inc. finally announced that it will be unwinding the ill-fated acquisition of the multi-cancer early detection test maker. In addition to stiff opposition from activist investor Carl Icahn that cost Illumina’s previous CEO and board chair their positions, European and U.S. regulators have consistently opposed the deal.
Sanofi SA backed out of its $750 million effort to advance Maze Therapeutics Inc.’s oral Pompe disease candidate, MZE-001, after the U.S. FTC filed a federal lawsuit to block the deal, claiming the Paris-based firm was seeking to eliminate a nascent competitor.
With U.S. drug prices a perennial issue, several lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, are increasingly looking beyond biopharma to identify other “persons of interest” that may be complicit in the high list prices facing American patients.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced Nov. 21 that it has obtained a civil monetary penalty in the amount of $700,000 from CRI Genetics LLC, an enforcement action taken under the agency’s policy for biometrics information.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is clearly a more activist agency of late, although much of that activism has been around mergers and acquisitions. The latest FTC move, however, deals with investigative authorities that will be applied toward artificial intelligence (AI), which Katie Bond of Keller & Heckerman LLP said will give the agency considerable powers of discovery regardless of the merits of the enforcement action.
The U.S. FTC’s policing of Orange Book patent listings begs the question of when, and whether, the FDA will deliver on its commitment to provide more clarity on the types of device patents that can be listed as covering a “drug product.”
Carrying through on a policy it adopted a few months ago to crack down on potentially anticompetitive FDA Orange Book listings, the U.S. FTC put 10 drug companies on notice that it’s challenging several of their “improperly or inaccurately listed” patents through the FDA’s regulatory dispute process.
Biopharma companies and industry advocates received the message the U.S. FTC intended to send when it broke new antitrust ground earlier this year in challenging Amgen Inc.’s $27.8 billion acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics plc. Now they’re uniting to send a message of their own – in the guise of an awareness campaign showing that the FTC’s new approach to M&A reviews and antitrust enforcement will undermine the ecosystem responsible for innovative and important therapies the world over.
The U.S. FTC put brand drug companies on notice Sept. 14 when the commissioners unanimously voted, 3-0, to issue a policy statement recognizing that improperly listed patents in the FDA’s Orange Book “may constitute an unfair method of competition.”