Legal

Despite a decline over the past year of class-action lawsuits, life science companies remain a popular target for securities fraud litigation.
The government shutdown threw a wrench into several biotech company’s plans for initial public offerings (IPOs). Although the government is only guaranteed to stay open until February 15, several biotechs are working to get their IPOs launched in that window. Here’s a look.
After Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, a former executive with Eli Lilly, unveiled a pricing reform that would allow pharma companies to end the rebate system and pass those savings directly to consumers, leaders from across the pharma industry are offering early support for the proposal.
Takeda Pharmaceutical released data from its Phase IIIb/IV clinical trial for Adynovate. On the same day, jurors in a Delaware federal court ordered Takeda’s Baxalta unit to pay $155.19 million to Bayer AG for infringing a patent for Adynovate.
Genentech, a Roche company, is flexing its litigation muscle this week. The South San Francisco-based company has filed 18 lawsuits over the past few weeks to block competitors from selling a generic version of a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a fatal lung-scarring disease.
Last week HHS floated a plan that would allow companies to pass rebates of 26 to 30 percent of a drug’s list price directly to patients in order to be reflected in what consumers pay at the pharmacy counter.
Although bioterrorism doesn’t get the kind of attention more traditional bombings and shootings receive, the biotech industry and the federal government are paying attention and actively funding and developing countermeasures to potential bioterror, military and public health emergencies.
MorphoSys AG announced today that in its lawsuit against Janssen Biotech and Genmab A/S, the parties have settled the dispute.
In November, Chinese researcher He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology of China announced he had used CRISPR to alter the embryos of seven couples to make them resistant to HIV. To date, a set of twins were born and there is another pregnancy. This was met by near-universal condemnation in the global scientific community.
The court documents in Massachusetts reveal not only how much the family made from sales of the opioid, but also the tactics used to promote sales.
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