The Federal Trade Commission brought a lawsuit against several drug makers indicting them of violating the anti-trust laws. The FTC is saying that the agreement between these drug makers eventually led to delay in the availability of two pain treatments.
According to ABC News, the FTC accused Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc, Impax Laboratories Inc and Watson Laboratories Inc. of colliding to delay the U.S. launches of cheaper generic versions of two popular pain treatments. It's called the 'pay for delay' case brought by the commission in which a drug's original manufacturer agreed not to sell its own 'authorized generic' version of the drug until another drug company decides to start releasing the product on the market. This guarantees that no competition would arise and they can keep the prices high up to 6 months.
They've allegedly said that Endo, maker of Opana ER pain pills and the Lidoderm pain patch paid the other two companies as written by Yahoo. Endo, which is based on Dublin and has headquarters in Pennsylvania, wrote in an email that 'the FTC has no merit' since the agreement provided by Endo is allowing the generic versions to go on sale before expiration of the brand-name drugs' patents. Further, the FTC's complaint says that Endo and the two partner companies made a reverse payment under a May 2012 agreement with Watson. The deal barred them from selling an authorized generic version of Lidoderm and it would not be lifted up until Watson begin selling too.
CNBC wrote that the FTC chairman, Edith Ramirez, expressed her concern in a statement saying that these types of agreements "harm consumers twice - first by delaying the entry of generic drugs and then by preventing additional generic competition in the market following generic entry."
Additional, FTC said that Endo paid Impax more than $112 million then used the delay until 2013 to try to switch patients into a new formulation with longer life. Lidoderm is noted to be a blockbuster drug with $1 billion sales in US alone in 2012 while the OPEC ER had atleast $250 million revenues in 2010.
