Potentially anti-competitive patent settlements dwindle in US following Actavis case

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the USA has claimed that its tough action against paying generic manufacturers not to make copies of out-of-patent original medicine is having an effect.

In a new report, it has argued that the number of such potentially anti-competitive deals filed with the FTC dropped to 21 in the 2014 financial year, down from 29 in 2013 and 40 in 2012. This was before the US Supreme Court’s landmark antitrust decision in the ‘FTC v Actavis’ case in 2013, where judges ruled that a branded drug manufacturer’s reverse payment to a generic competitor to settle patent litigation can violate US antitrust laws.

Debbie Feinstein, FTC Competition Bureau Director, said: 'Consumers are better off when there is more competition from lower-priced generic medicines. So although it is too soon to know if these are lasting trends, it is encouraging to see a significant decline in the number of reverse payment settlements.'

The 21 settlements in 2014 involved 20 different branded pharmaceutical products, with combined annual US sales of US$6.2bn. Also, 11 of these deals involved companies that were first to seek FDA approval to market a generic version of a branded drug and hence were given protection for 180 days from other generic manufacturers’ competition.