Pharma News Briefs

• The Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog reports on a new paper by Prof. Christopher Leslie of Chicago-Kent College of Law advocating the use of antitrust law to challenge the licensing of invalid patents.
• Richard Epstein, my law school Property professor, has a new book out entitled Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation.  Judy Chevalier has this review at Slate.  Prof. Epstein wrote two related Op-Ed pieces for the Boston Globe and L.A. Times.
• Via Patent Circle, Abraxis, Orchid, and Sandoz have filed citizen petitions in support of their ANDAs for generic versions of Wyeth's Zosyn.  The Economic Times of India published this article about the petitions.
• Ed Silverman, veteran reporter for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, recently started Pharmalot, a new blog covering news and trends in the pharmaceutical industry.
• The Voluntary Trade Blog reports that FTC Commissioner William Kovacic, in a recent interview with Dow Jones, harshly critized the Department of Justice for advising the Supreme Court not to take the FTC v. Schering-Plough "reverse payments" case last year.
• Peter Zura's Two-Seventy-One Patent Blog reports on a recent district court decision applying the 271(e)(1) "safe harbor" to research tools.
• The Economist and The Scientist recently published articles on the current "dismal" state of the pharmaceutical industry.

Comments

[Jake Briskman]

Thanks for the great postings. This is an awesome blog.

Before addressing the merits of Prof. Epstein's claims regarding the stifling of innovation, his argument, that there should be less government intervention (citing that the government should not go as far as allowing negotiation or allowing the re-importation of pharmaceuticals) is inherently flawed.
In 2003, with the Medicare Modernization Act, Congress enacted 42 USC 1395w-111(i)(2) ( the ‘non-interference’ clause) prohibiting the secretary from negotiating on behalf of seniors. The Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act prohibits the parallel trading of pharmaceuticals into the US. Negotiation and trading are realities of free markets, but somehow it is argued that to allow this to happen is ‘government intervention,’ when the reality is that not allowing these things to happen is government intervention.

On the merits of the argument (which is basically: anything done to lower profits will stifle innovation) the problem is that this argument contains the underlying assumption that the pharmaceutical companies fiduciary duty is to the general population to produce innovative drugs and not to their stockholders to increase profits. Their fiduciary duty is in fact to their stockholders to increase the share price, and this is done by investing the lionshare of their money into drugs that treat chronic conditions that are not even necessarily an improvement over the drugs already on the market. This is done for obvious reasons.

I invite comments.