Effexor - More Generic Legal Battles
While the legal wrangling over the safety of antidepressants such as SNRI Effexor and SSRI Paxil has quieted down, another set of lawsuits seems to be popping up relating to these drugs. In the same week that Glaxo Smith Kline was sued for breaching an exclusivity agreement with a manufacturer of a generic form of Paxil, a judge in Israel has more or less dismissed a lawsuit attempting to disrupt pharma company Teva's manufacture of generic Effexor.
Makhteshim-Agan Industries and its child company, Lycored, both filed suit against Teva, alleging that Teva's campaign to make and market generic Effexor XR infringed on a patent that M-A holds. However, while the courts in Israel did see the merit in the case, they dismissed the scale of the claims, only allowing M-A a paltry award of US$2 million.
It may seem a little mad to say “only” $2 million, but such amounts don't even make a dent in the figures of major pharma companies. Glaxo set aside more than $2 billion dollars to deal with litigation against Paxil. M-A originally sought $107 million dollars in damages, not $2 million. Before the housing bubble burst, some townhouses in Washington, D.C., were selling for $2 million dollars. This “award” is basically a saving-face arrangement — nothing more.
Teva made headlines with the massive scale of its entry into the generic drug market. The company is expected to make $650 million dollars during its exclusive period to market Effexor XR's generic form, and it used two jumbo jets to transport and market its newly-available medication once it had the right to begin selling. The stakes involved here make the award judges granted M-A entirely irrelevant, and will allow Teva officials to go forward without any sense of interruption or even inconvenience as they market this powerful, controversial antidepressant.
