right time?, page-15

I understand Themis has the tubes in the boxes and ready to go - part of the deal with Novartis was that it had to be a simultaneous launch - if we get past the end of this month without either product being sold I am starting to wonder if this was a smart way for big pharma to keep our superior product off the shelves for an extra year than it should have been - no doubt there comes a point in time when we can legally challenge them to claim they are effectively blocking our launch but who knows when that is. May not be the case but they do have past history of such tactics as per kens post last month illustrated and this one wouldn't have even cost them a cent! I guess we should be proud that we hit their radar enough for then to go to the effort but still these delays are getting a little silly.

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Two Pharma Companies Fined Over 'Pay For Delay'; Novartis Unrepentant About Suffering Caused

from the profits-before-patients dept


Back in April of this year, we wrote about a spate of investigations around the world into "pay for delay" deals, whereby a big pharma company essentially buys off manufacturers of generics so that the former can continue to enjoy monopoly pricing long after its patents have expired. One of those involved the European Union, and the two pharma companies Johnson & Johnson and Novartis. As PharmaTimes reports, fines are being imposed on them for their actions:

The European Commission has fined Johnson & Johnson (J&J) just under 10.8 million euros and Novartis 5.49 million euros, after finding that their subsidiaries in the Netherlands had agreed an anticompetitive deal aimed at delaying the market entry there of a generic version of the painkiller Duragesic (fentanyl), thus breaching European Union (EU) antitrust rules.
Kens
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