Gilead, BMS, Janssen facing HIV generic antitrust suit
Gilead, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Janssen are facing accusations that they suppressed competition in the market for drugs used to treat the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Health insurance company Humana sued the drugmakers at the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Monday, December 13, followed by nearly identical litigation by another health plan provider, Centene, a day later.
The world's largest generic drugmaker Teva Pharmaceuticals was named in the suits, which hold that Gilead and its conspirators embarked on a scheme to stall generic competition,
Humana accused Gilead of persuading the Israel-based Teva, to enter into a "pay for delay" agreement to prevent the introduction of a generic alternative once the patent covering the HIV treatment, Viread (tenofovir disoproxil), had expired.
Back in 2020, a medicare recovery specialist, MSP Recovery Claims, sued the same companies, claiming that Gilead had entered into collusive and illegal horizontal agreements with its co-conspirators to block competition against tenofovir disoproxil.
In this week’s suit, Humana stated that more than 35 million people worldwide and 700,000 people in the US have died from HIV infection since 1981.
“Despite the advent of numerous drugs over the past twenty years, the disease continues to affect millions of Americans. As of 2017, more than 1.1 million people in the US were living with HIV and nearly 40,000 new patients are diagnosed with the disease each year,” it said.
According to Humana, Gilead dominates the market for antiretroviral drugs, which are essential to delivering effective HIV treatment. It manufactures three of the four best-selling HIV drugs on the market, as well as many other drugs that are used in HIV combination antiretroviral therapy. This means that more than 80% of US patients starting an HIV drug treatment regimen take one or more of Gilead’s products every day, asserted Humana.
The company contended that even though Gilead’s HIV medications cost less than $10 to produce, the drugmaker has charged insurance firms thousands of dollars for a 30-day supply over the past two decades.
“With yearly sales in the US exceeding $13 billion, Gilead has extracted enormous profits from its HIV drugs. Gilead’s ability to sustain supracompetitive profits in its multi-billion-dollar HIV treatment franchise has been engineered through a comprehensive, illegal scheme to blockade competition,” stated Humana.
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