The Purple Pill and “Pay for Delay”

ATTORNEY: JAYNE A. GOLDSTEIN
POMERANTZ MONITOR, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013 

Pomerantz is serving as interim co-lead counsel in an antitrust lawsuit against various pharmaceutical companies. We allege that the brand company, AstraZeneca, paid generic drug manufacturers Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals, Teva Pharmaceuticals and Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories (“Generic Defendants”) to keep generic versions of the blockbuster drug Nexium from coming to market for six years or more. Nexium, a prescription medication commonly advertised as “the purple pill,” is used to treat heartburn and gastric reflux disease. Pomerantz represents consumers, self-insured insurance plans and insurance companies who were forced to pay monopoly prices for Nexium because there was no generic competition. 

Generic versions of brand name drugs contain the same active ingredient, and are determined by the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) to be just as safe and effective as their brand name counterparts. The only significant difference between them is their price: when there is a single generic competitor, generics are usually at least 25% cheaper than their brand name counterparts; and when there are multiple generic competitors, this discount typically increases to 50% to 80% (or more). The launch of a generic drug usually brings huge cost savings for all drug purchasers. 

We allege that in order to protect the $3 billion in annual Nexium sales from the threat of generic competition, AstraZeneca agreed to pay the Generic Defendants substantial sums in exchange for their agreement to delay marketing their less expensive generic versions of Nexium for as many as six years or more, i.e., from 2008 until May 27, 2014. 

Under the Hatch Waxman Act, the law which governs how generic pharmaceuticals come to market, when a generic drug manufacturer wants to sell a generic equivalent of a patented drug, it must file an Abbreviated New Drug Application (“ANDA”) which must certify either that (1) no patent for the brand name drug has been filed with the FDA; (2) the patent for the brand name drug has expired; (3) the patent for the brand name drug will expire on a particular date and the generic company does not seek to market its generic product before that date; or (4) the patent for the brand name drug is invalid or will not be infringed by the generic manufacturer’s proposed product (a so-called “Paragraph IV certification”). 

In the case of Nexium, the generic manufacturers filed a Paragraph IV certification. This filing gave the brand manufacturer forty-five days in which to sue the generic companies for patent infringement. If the brand company initiates a patent infringement action against the generic filer, the FDA will not grant final approval of the new generic drug until the earlier of (a) the passage of thirty months, or (b) the issuance of a decision by a court that the patent is invalid or not infringed by the generic manufacturer’s ANDA. In this case, AstraZeneca sued all three of the Generic Defendants. 

As an incentive to spur generic companies to seek approval of generic alternatives to branded drugs, the Hatch Waxman law rewards the first generic manufacturer to file an ANDA containing a Paragraph IV certification by granting it a period of one hundred and eighty days in which there is no competition from other generic versions of the drug. This means that the first approved generic is the only available generic for at least six months, a large economic benefit to the generic company. Brand name manufacturers can “beat the system” by claiming a valid patent even if such patent is very weak, listing and suing any generic competitor that files an ANDA with a Paragraph IV certification (even if the competitor’s product does not actually infringe the listed patents) in order to delay final FDA approval of the generic for up to thirty months. 

In Nexium’s case, when the Generic Defendants filed their Paragraph IV certifications they alleged, among other reasons, that the Nexium patents were not valid because Nexium was not significantly different from AstraZeneca’s prior drug, Prilosec. The active ingredient in Prilosec is omeprazole, a substance consisting of equal parts of two different isomers of the same molecule. 

Nevertheless, after receiving the Paragraph IV certifications from the Generic Defendants, AstraZeneca filed patent infringement litigation. Just as the thirty months was about to expire and generic Nexium would have been able to come to market, the companies settled the patent litigation. AstraZeneca used the strength of its wallet as opposed to the strength of its patents to obtain the Generic Defendants’ agreement to postpone the launch of their generic Nexium products. In light of the substantial possibility that AstraZeneca’s Nexium patents would be invalidated, in which case AstraZeneca would have been unable to keep generic versions of Nexium from swiftly capturing the vast majority of Nexium sales, AstraZeneca agreed to share its monopoly profits with the Generic Defendants as the quid pro quo for the Generic Defendants’ agreement not to compete with AstraZeneca in the Nexium market until May 27, 2014. 

These cases are commonly called either “pay for delay” or “reverse payment” cases. Until recently, the various federal appellate courts were divided on whether these “settlements” violated the antitrust laws by improperly prolonging the monopoly granted by the patent laws. In June of 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court held that such settlements are subject to antitrust scrutiny. 

The trial of this case is scheduled to begin on March 3, 2014.