The price tag is $24 million. The deal resolves claims that Serono wrongfully encouraged doctors to unnecessarily prescribe its AIDS drug Serostim, which is used to treat AIDS wasting.

The lawsuit charged Serono with promoting the use of an unapproved medical device that improperly diagnosed people as having AIDS wasting; providing doctors with travel stipends in exchange for their agreement to prescribe Serostim; and marketing the drug for uses that were not approved by the FDA.

The deal follows a settlement reached in October 2005 by the US Department of Justice in which Serono agreed to pay $704 million in fines and pled guilty to criminal charges for the unlawful promotion of Serostim. Serono also signed a ‘Corporate Intergrity Agreement.’

“We hope that this settlement will not only compensate those consumers and health plans that were deceived into paying unnecessarily for Serostim, but it will also serve as a precedent for other drug companies that would venture to take advantage of seriously ill patients in the name of profits,” says Alex Sugerman-Brozan, director of the Prescription Access Litigation project, the consumer group that filed suit.

Maybe. But federal prosecutors have previously indicated that numerous fraud claims are stacked up. We may not know for a few years if corporate behavior is really changed by these types of settlements.