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Court affirms right of drug companies to sell unbranded versions of their own drugs
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A U.S. appeals court has upheld the right of pharmaceutical companies to sell unbranded versions of their own proprietary drugs once the patents on those drugs expire, even if generic drug companies’ sales are undercut as a result, according to a Bloomberg News report.
In a suit over an epilepsy drug, one of the world’s largest generic manufacturers sued Pfizer to prevent Pfizer from marketing a lower-cost version of its own brand-name drug. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the law did not prohibit these kinds of “authorized generics,” according to Bloomberg.
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether authorized generics can be deemed “anti-competitive” to the generics industry, the Bloomberg report noted. Under current federal law, the first generic-drug marketer to challenge patents on a drug gains 6 months of marketing exclusivity. The lawsuit in question argued that Pfizer sought to obliterate the incentive by marketing its own generic version of the drug.