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19 December 2018Big Pharma

FTC agrees to re-open Actavis and Watson merger decision

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has approved an application by pharmaceutical company Teva to re-open and modify its decision and order regarding the 2012 merger of Actavis and Watson Pharmaceuticals.

Before the announcement, on Tuesday, December 18, the FTC was accepting public comments on the application by Teva requesting the commission to extend an agreement to supply drugs to Pfizer.

At the time of the merger between Actavis and Watson in 2012, the FTC had alleged that a merger may restrict competition for a number of generic drugs, including the generic version of the abuse-resistant opioid painkiller Embeda (morphine sulfate and naltrexone HCl).

Under the requirements of the FTC’s 2012 decision and order, Actavis and Watson were to supply Embeda to Pfizer for a period of no more than four years after Pfizer’s re-launch of Embeda, which occurred in January 2015.

Pfizer did not have the capability to independently manufacture Embeda in 2012.

In 2015, Actavis bought Allergan and rebranded as Allergan, although the company’s US and Canadian generics business continued to operate under the name Actavis.

Then, in 2016, Teva acquired Allergan’s generics division, and assumed the obligations under the Embeda supply agreement and continued plans to develop a generic version of Embeda.

According to Teva’s application, “the public interest heavily favours removing or extending” the agreement past December. In doing so, Teva claimed that it would “preserve Pfizer’s ability to supply patients with Embeda”.

In addition, Teva claimed that extending the agreement would not impact its own plans to introduce a generic version of the drug.

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More on this story

Big Pharma
4 January 2019   Teva Pharmaceuticals has announced that it has resolved a dispute with Amgen over Teva’s generic cinacalcet HCI product.
Generics
20 February 2019   Teva Pharmaceutical and the US Federal Trade Commission have reached a settlement to end their long-running battles over so called “pay-for-delay” agreements in the pharmaceutical industry.
Americas
18 March 2021   The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is launching a new international working group in an “imperative” move to better analyse the impact of pharmaceutical mergers.