Trial set for Gilead HIV antitrust claims case
Gilead, Johnson & Johnson and others will face trial in May | Class-action suit involves allegations of anticompetitive practices.
Gilead Sciences, along with co-defendants Johnson & Johnson and Japan Tobacco, will head to court in May to face allegations of restricting competition in the HIV drug market in a class-action suit.
The firms have been accused of a number of anticompetitive practices that have handed Gilead a monopoly in the market for HIV treatment.
According to the complaint against them, the scheme has enabled Gilead and the other accused firms to unlawfully extend patent protection for their drugs, prevent generic competitors from entering the market, and charge inflated prices for HIV drugs.
A federal judge in California has thrown out certain claims but stopped short of dismissing the allegations altogether, and now a trial has been set for May.
The antiretrovirals market
Gilead’s medicine belongs to the combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) treatment method for HIV. These regimens consist of a combination or ‘cocktail’ of drugs, and Gilead makes one of the components in this process known as an NRTI, which was its Tenofovir product.
In the lawsuit, first filed in 2019, it is alleged that Gilead controlled the market for Tenofovir, and therefore the market for cART, even though Tenofovir “was discovered more than 30 years ago by researchers in the Czech Republic”.
Gilead and the other firms named in the suit “entered into a series of collusive and illegal horizontal agreements providing that each co-conspirator would not compete against Gilead’s Tenofovir, and would effectively block other companies from competing against Tenofovir, even after Gilead’s Tenofovir patents expired”, it is claimed in the filing.
The defendants had argued that “where competitors enter into a joint venture (or other business collaboration), it is reasonable to have a provision barring members of the joint venture from competing with the joint venture—or else there would be no incentive to enter into the joint venture in the first place.”
They said that deals of this nature were valid per se under competition law, a notion that was rejected by the court.
Bristol Myers Squibb was initially implicated in the suit, but settled last year and is no longer involved in the proceedings, according to Fierce Pharma.
Did you enjoy reading this story? Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories sent like this straight to your inbox.
