PHILADELPHIA - A Pennsylvania federal judge has granted a motion to dismiss some claims in a pharmaceutical conspiracy case.
A multi-district antitrust lawsuit made claims that pharmaceutical companies had schemed to control prices of certain generic products. However, the court found that not all the complaints had significant evidence.
“The Court will grant Teligent’s motion to dismiss Group 1 Plaintiffs’ Sherman Act claims because econazole Plaintiffs have not sufficiently alleged that it engaged in parallel conduct, and will do so without prejudice to econazole Plaintiffs’ ability to seek the Court’s leave to amend their claims against Teligent. The Court otherwise concludes that Group 1 Plaintiffs’ claims under Section 1 of the Sherman Act are sufficient to withstand dismissal and the motions to dismiss Group 1 Plaintiffs’ Sherman Act claims will be denied,” Judge Cynthia Rufe wrote in her Oct 16th decision.
However, some drug companies will need to keep defending themselves, as Rufe did not dismiss all claims.
“With the exception of the motion to dismiss by Teligent, which will be granted, the Court finds that Group 1 Plaintiffs have pled plus factors which are sufficient to permit their Sherman Act claims to withstand dismissal,” she wrote.
The lawsuit saw three types of class plaintiffs “assert claims on behalf of overlapping putative nationwide classes of purchasers of the generic drugs included in this litigation,” according to the court decision.
“Class Plaintiffs contend Defendants engaged in anticompetitive conduct that was part of a larger conspiracy or series of conspiracies involving many generic pharmaceutical manufacturers and many generic pharmaceuticals,” Rufe noted in the decision.
The plaintiffs alleged that a list of drugs saw a “dramatic price increase” between 2012 and 2014. They also claim these increases were very large and “would not have been implemented by ‘a rational company... unless certain that its ostensible competitors would follow’,” the court decision stated.
The plaintiffs also claim that the price increase was the result of collaboration between the defendants and was done in an effort to “restrain competition for the sale of [the relevant drug] in the United States.”
According to the court decision, before the price increase, the cost of each drug had been stable. To prove their case, some plaintiffs noted there was a federal Department of Justice criminal investigation and a grand jury proceeding to examine possible collusion into the generic drug price practices.