Judge Rules Drug Maker Cannot Halt Sales of Alzheimer's Medicine

HughPickens.com writes Andrew Pollack reports at the NYT that a federal judge has blocked an attempt by the drug company Actavis to halt sales of an older form of its Alzheimer's disease drug Namenda in favor of a newer version with a longer patent life after New York's attorney general filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing the drug company of forcing patients to switch to the newer version of the widely used medicine to hinder competition from generic manufacturers. "Today's decision prevents Actavis from pursuing its scheme to block competition and maintain its high drug prices," says Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. "Our lawsuit against Actavis sends a clear message: Drug companies cannot illegally prioritize profits over patients."

The case involves a practice called product hopping where brand name manufacturers make a slight alteration to their prescription drug (PDF) and engage in marketing efforts to shift consumers from the old version to the new to insulate the drug company from generic competition for several years. For its part Actavis argued that an injunction would be "unprecedented and extraordinary" and would cause the company "great financial harm, including unnecessary manufacturing and marketing costs." Namenda has been a big seller. In the last fiscal year, the drug generated $1.5 billion in sales. The drug costs about $300 a month.

Comments

Re:Can you say...

[TheGratefulNet]

yes, requiring a company WHO IS IN THE HEALTH-CARE BUSINESS to continue saving lives and not taking profits as the first thing.

yes, makes sense to me. but then again, I'm a human being, not a pycho CEO or politician.

there should be a law: if you are in the healthcare business (which is your choice) then you MUST put patients first above all else.

doctors have to swear this. why not the makers of drugs and such? it would fix a LOT of what is broken with the western world, if we did that. think of how much GOOD would be done to humanity, as a whole!

Re:Can you say...

[geoskd]

Any law made like that could almost certainly be used to ensure that any Patent YOU might ever have could be voided if you weren't making the product the day the patent was issued, and every day thereafter.

Bingo...

Murder for profit

[Required Snark]

At best, this is gaming the system for guaranteed profit. At worst, it's murder for profit.

This is not an environment were the consumer can just automatically go to another vendor. The myth of a free market does not apply because there is no parity between the user and the producer. Although generics exist, they cannot always be substituted, and sometimes they don't even exist.

Medical companies are profit driven to the extent that they cannot be trusted. They routinely lie about both the safety and the efficacy of their products. This puts the health and even the lives of patients at risk all the time.

For example, De Puy/Johnson and Johnson produced metal on metal hip implants, and their own internal data showed that they were failing at a high rate and requiring additional surgery. Additionally, metal fragments were released into the bodies of recipients and causing metal poisoning. They decided to phase out the product because of "declining sales" and did not do a recall or inform doctors or the FDA.

At the beginning of 2010, DePuy Orthopaedics said they were phasing out the ASR Hip Implant because of declining sales, but never mentioned the high failure rate data from an Australian implant registry. In March 2010, the New York Times reported that DePuy issued its first warning to doctors and patients about the high early failure rate. However, at this point, they still had not issued a recall of the product. In fact, they claimed any statements referencing a recall were false.

Regulation is a necessity because the history of drug and medical equipment is filled with business practices leading to horrible outcomes, including needless death.

In addition, drug companies get huge direct and indirect subsidies from the government. A lot of the basic research is government funded and handed over the the drug companies at no cost. When a drug is going off patent, it is legal for the patent holder to pay other drug companies to not produce generic versions. This is the polar opposite of free enterprise. It's legalize collusion to maintain state sanctioned monopolies.

I'm routinely baffled and angered by self-styled "defenders of capitalism" who excuse dangerous and grossly anti-competitive business behavior. If the government did things like this they would be screaming like stuck pigs, but when the same or worse is done under the flag of capitalism it somehow is transformed into a sacred act, and negative consequences are left out of the picture. It seems obvious to me that the same kind of scrutiny should be applied to any big organization. Only being critical of one side is just stupid. Stop doing it.