Tag: pharma
-
Combination Therapies in Pharma – Removing the Antitrust Roadblock
This month, the Belgian Competition Authority (BCA) published guidance on information exchange between pharmaceutical companies in the context of the reimbursement application procedure for combination therapies. This follows a prioritisation statement adopted by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in 2023 on the same issue and long-standing demands from the Belgian pharmaceutical industry.[1] In…
-
Draconian but unavoidable? Illumina’s quest for GRAIL ends in a record fine
Sprint races can be decided by hundredths of a second. But the sprinter who pushes off before the starting gun sounds “jumps the gun” and faces harsh punishment. In our never-ending attempts to make competition law sound cool, practitioners refer to the completion of a deal before mandatory clearance is obtained as “gun jumping”, even…
-
Misinformation, disparagement, opacity and throttling – how far does the ‘special responsibility’ go?
What links a multiple sclerosis drug ingredient, trains tickets in the South of England and iPhone batteries? Very little you might say? But in fact these subjects are all bound up in what some believe to be an ongoing extension to the frontiers on the law on abuse of dominance. Just how far does the…
-
Antitrust and private equity – parental liability rules can allow authorities to claw back profits in UK and Europe
Private equity (PE) is in focus for antitrust authorities. In a merger control context, concerns around roll-up and keeping the bigger picture in mind occupy both Jonathan Kanter at the DOJ and Lina Khan at the FTC. My colleague Stijn Huijts covered this in his 13 June 2022 blog. Consideration of the PE angle is…
-
The loser still pays – The Supreme Court’s judgment on costs in Phenytoin
The UK Supreme Court issued an interesting judgment yesterday involving the question whether the CMA should cover a party’s litigation costs when that party successfully appeals the CMA’s decision under the Competition Act. The judgment is related to the CMA’s decision to impose penalties on Pfizer and Flynn Pharma for hiking up the prices of…
-
Sanofi and McKesson/Phoenix – Better late than never?
Early spring brought us a couple of interesting competition law developments involving France. First, the Court of Appeal in Paris annulled a judgment by a lower court that dismissed a damages action against Sanofi in relation to its practice of “denigration” or “disparagement” of competitors. Next, the European Commission partly referred the McKesson/Phoenix merger to…
-
No-poach and wage-fixing agreements – Is antitrust game?
No-poach and wage-fixing agreements are somewhat of a new trend in antitrust enforcement. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) recently beat a challenge against its first criminal wage fixing case, involving wages for physical therapists. The DoJ has opened two further labour-related cases, also in healthcare. Meanwhile in the EU, the Commission has been vocal…
-
New UK national security rules – What do they mean for life science investments?
The National Security and Investment Act 2021 (NSI Act) comes into force on 4 January 2022. From then, the UK Government will be empowered to call in for review any qualifying acquisition which may give rise to UK national security concerns. The NSI Act captures acquisitions of any size, including in certain cases where minority…
-
Pay-for-delay hits 18 in the EU – Adulthood, but what comes next?
(…and four other takeaways from the Cephalon decision) Although the European Commission adopted the latest of its pay-for-delay decisions in November 2020, the Cephalon decision was only published in July of this year. With the Lundbeck agreements first coming under Commission scrutiny in 2003, pay-for-delay enforcement turned 18 this year. Below we set out a…