Editors --Contributors --Foreword --Preface --Pharmaceutical Patents and Competition Issues --What Is Going on in National Systems?

Patent settlements between originator and generic firms in the pharmaceutical industry have been challenged by antitrust and competition authorities in the U.S. and the EU. Particularly Settlements with large "reverse payments" to generic firms raise the concern of collusive behaviour for protecting weak patents and delaying price competition through generic entry and therefore harming consumers. However, it is still heavily disputed under what conditions such patent settlements are anti-competitive and violate antitrust rules. This article scrutinizes critically what economic analysis has so far contributed to our knowledge about the effects of these patent settlements and the possible rules for their antitrust treatment. An important claim of this paper is that the problem of patent settlements can only be understood, if we analyze it not only from a narrow antitrust perspective but also take into account its deep interrelationship with the problems (and the economics) of the patent system. Therefore we identify three different channels of effects, how patent settlements can influence consumer welfare: (1) price effects, (2) innovation incentive effects, and (3) effects via the incentives to challenge weak patents. The paper critically analyzes the existing economic studies and identifies a number of Research gaps, especially also in regard to trade offs between different effects. It also suggests that policy Solutions for these patent settlements should also be sought in combination with patent law solutions.

Reverse payment settlements or “pay-for-delay agreements” between originators and generic drug manufacturers create heated debates regarding the balance between competition and intellectual property law. These settlements touch upon sensitive issues such as timely generic entry and access to affordable pharmaceuticals and also the need to preserve innovation incentives for originators and to strengthen the pipeline of life-saving pharmaceuticals. This book is one of the first to critically and comparatively analyse how such patent settlements and various other strategies employed by the pharmaceutical industry are scrutinised by both United States (US) and European courts and enforcement authorities, and to discuss the applicable legal tests and the main criteria used for their assessment. The book’s ultimate objective is to provide guidance to the pharmaceutical industry regarding the types of patent settlements, strategies and conduct which may be problematic from US antitrust and European Union (EU) competition law perspectives and to assist practitioners in structuring settlements which are both efficient and compliant. To this end, an exhaustive legal analysis of some of the most controversial issues regarding pharmaceutical patent settlements is provided, including: – the lengthy split among US Circuit Courts on the issue of pay-for-delay settlements, its resolution by the US Supreme Court in FTC v. Actavisand subsequent jurisprudence; – the decision of Lundbeck v. Commissionby the European General Court and the Servier decision of the European Commission; – the Roche/Novartisdecision of the European Court of Justice and the most important decisions by National Competition Authorities on pharma patent settlements in the EU; – an overview of other types of strategies such as product-hopping and product reformulations, no-authorised generic commitments, problematic side-deals, mechanisms affecting generic substitution; – the rejection of the “scope of the patent” test in both the US and the EU and the balancing of patent law and antitrust law considerations in the prevailing applicable tests; – the benefits of settlements and the main criteria for assessing their legitimacy under US antitrust and EU competition law. The analysis provides concrete examples of both illegitimate and legitimate settlements and strategies, emphasising on conduct that falls within a grey zone and on the circumstances and criteria under which such conduct could be deemed problematic from an antitrust perspective. This book will serve as a valuable guide for pharmaceutical companies wishing to minimise the risk of engaging in conduct that could potentially infringe US antitrust and EU competition law. It further aims to save courts and enforcement agencies and also practitioners and academics considerable time and resources by providing an exhaustive analysis of the relevant caselaw, with the ultimate goal to increase legal certainty on the most controversial aspects of patent settlements in the pharmaceutical industry.

This dissertation examines the law and economics of generic drug entry, and the problems that arise from specific U.S. regulatory arrangements that govern innovation and competition in the market for patented pharmaceuticals. As Chapter 1 explains, competitive entry by generic drug makers is limited by both patents and industry-specific regulation, which together provide the means for brand-name drug makers to avoid competition and thereby recoup large investments in research, development, and testing. At the same time, the complex rules of the Hatch-Waxman Act furnish a pathway by which generic drug makers may challenge the validity or scope of brand-name patents, with a view to entering the market with a competing product prior to patent expiration. The subsequent chapters examine several aspects of the competitive interaction between brand-name and generic drug makers. Chapter 2 analyzes settlements of patent litigation between brand-name and generic drug makers, in which the brand-name firm pays the generic firm in exchange for delayed market entry. Such pay-for-delay settlements are an important, unresolved question in U.S. antitrust policy. The analysis reveals that the pay-for-delay settlement problem is more severe than has been commonly understood. Several specific features of the Act—in particular, a 180-day bounty granted to certain generic drug makers as an incentive to pursue pre-expiration entry—widen the potential for anticompetitive harm from pay-for-delay settlements, compared to the usual understanding. In addition, I show that settlements are "innovation inefficient" as a means of providing profits and hence ex ante innovation incentives to brand-name drug makers. To the extent that Congress established a preferred tradeoff between innovation and competition when it passed the Act, settlements that implement a different, less competition-protective tradeoff are particularly problematic from an antitrust standpoint. Chapter 3 synthesizes available public information about pay-for-delay settlements in order to offer a new account of the extent and evolution of settlement practice. The analysis draws upon a novel dataset of 143 such settlements. The analysis uncovers an evolution in the means by which a brand-name firm can pay a generic firm to delay entry, including a variety of complex "side deals" by which a brand-name firm can compensate a generic firm in a disguised fashion. It also reveals several novel forms of regulatory avoidance. The analysis in the chapter suggests that, as a matter of institutional choice, an expert agency is in a relatively good position to conduct the aggregate analysis needed to identify an optimal antitrust rule. Chapter 4 examines the co-evolution of increased brand-name patenting and increased generic pre-expiration challenges. It draws upon a second novel dataset of drug approvals, applications, patents, and other drug characteristics. Its first contribution is to chart the growth of patent portfolios and pre-expiration challenges. Over time, patenting has increased, measured by the number of patents per drug and the length of the nominal patent term. During the same period, challenges have increased as well, and drugs are challenged sooner, relative to brand-name approval. The analysis shows that brand-name sales, a proxy for the profitability of the drug, have a positive effect on the likelihood of generic challenge, consistent with the view that patents that later prove to be valuable receive greater ex post scrutiny. The likelihood of challenge also varies by patent type and timing of expiration. Conditional on sales and other drug characteristics, drugs with weaker patents, particularly those that expire later than a drug's basic compound patent, face a significantly higher likelihood of challenge. Though the welfare implications of Hatch-Waxman patent challenge provisions are complicated, these results suggest these challenges serve a useful purpose, in promoting scrutiny of low quality and late-expiring patents.