Louise Beange has written an interesting post on our sister blog, IP Whiteboard, about the decision by the US Supreme Court to hear a dispute over the legality of ‘pay-for-delay’ or reverse-payment agreements between patent holders and generic manufacturers. These are settlement agreements in patent infringement litigation in which patent holders pay generic manufacturers to delay releasing generic alternatives to pharmaceuticals. Read more about it here.
New statistics released by the FTC last week show that the regulator’s interest in pharmaceutical companies extends beyond pay-for-delay agreements. The FTC’s 2012 horizontal merger investigation update report shows that, between 1996 and 2011, some sort of antitrust challenge was taken in 119 of the 122 pharmaceutical markets considered during full horizontal merger reviews.
