This time, it’s in Europe. Switzerland’s Schweizerhall expects to market a lower-priced version of the widely used blood thinner within the month, and the news sent Sanofi-Aventis shares plummeting.
“The German authorities have basically finished the registration procedure and we’re now just waiting for the paperwork,” Luzi Andreas von Bidder, Schweizerhall’s chairman, tells Bloomberg News. The [...]

Now that Apotex has won a bid to produce and ship copycat AIDS meds to Rwanda, the generic drugmaker says it will never participate in the goodwill program again unless the federal government simplifies the process, The Toronto Globe & Mail reports.
Apotex became the first generic drugmaker in the world yesterday to be awarded a [...]

Andrew Bodnar, once a senior vice president, was charged by the US Department of Justice with lying to federal authorities about a botched patent deal involving the Plavix blood thinner. You may recall Bristol-Myers Squibb has already pleaded guilty and paid a $1 million fine for misleading the government about the deal, which included a [...]

A federal appeals court has decided that the drugmakers can’t be held liable for a pair of suicides that were blamed on antidepressants and an alleged failure by the manufacturers to include sufficient warnings about links to suicide. The ruling comes just months before the US Supreme Court is scheduled to review preemption and whether [...]

The drugmaker was accused of fibbing to the Federal Trade Commission about its botched patent deal with Apotex over a generic version of Plavix. The two-count criminal charge was filed today in federal court in Washington. This isn’t a surprise, because Bristol-Myers earlier this month said it would plead guilty to making false statements and [...]

This doesn’t come as a shock. Andy Bodnar, you may recall, had the distinction of getting skunked by Apotex’s Barry Sherman last year while negotiating the ill-fated deal to forestall generic Plavix and preserve Bristol-Myers’ strangehold on the market. The senior vp was dispatched by former ceo Peter Dolan to do the dirty work.
Since then, [...]

File this one under ‘Been Down So Long, Looks Like Up To Me.’
The drugmaker is gradually coming out from under that government cloud. First, there’s an agreement today with the Justice Department’s anti-trust division, which was conducting a criminal investigation into the botched settlement with Apotex and Sanofi-Aventis over the Plavix bloodthinner, a debacle that [...]

The FDA has decided against approving generic versions of Pfizer’s Norvasc blood-pressure drug other than a generic version already launched by Mylan Laboratories. The decision was disclosed in a filing today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Mylan launched its generic version of Norvasc last month a few months earlier than expected [...]

A federal court has ordered the FDA not to approve anymore abbreviated new drug applications for generic forms of Pfizer’s Norvasc, until at least April 13. The ruling applies to 2.5mg, 5mg and 10mg doses. Acccording to Mylan, the FDA told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia it will solicit “views of [...]

A US appeals court reversed a lower court patent decision favoring Pfizer, which has been trying to block Bernie Sherman’s Apotex from launching a generic version of its Norvasc blood pressure pill. The drug rang up $4.8 billion in sales last year, making it Pfizer’s No. 2 med.
Pfizer may appeal, but Wall Street looks for [...]