Al­ler­gan faces fresh woes with Resta­sis patents as Wal­green, re­tail­ers file law­suit over 'an­ti­com­pet­i­tive con­duc­t'

Al­ler­gan’s patent trou­bles with Resta­sis mush­roomed on Wednes­day when four ma­jor US re­tail­ers teamed up to sue the drug­mak­er for a string of al­leged an­titrust vi­o­la­tions.

Plain­tiffs Wal­green, Kroger, Al­bert­sons and HEB put it this way in a scathing com­plaint:

Al­ler­gan un­law­ful­ly main­tained its mo­nop­oly through a scheme that in­clud­ed, in­ter alia, mak­ing ma­te­r­i­al mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions and omis­sions to the Unit­ed States Patent and Trade­mark Of­fice (“PTO”) that al­lowed it to ob­tain patents to which it was not en­ti­tled; im­prop­er­ly list­ing those patents in the FDA’s Or­ange Book; su­ing gener­ic com­peti­tors for al­leged in­fringe­ment of those in­valid and un­en­force­able patents; and then trans­fer­ring own­er­ship of the in­valid patents to a sov­er­eign Na­tive Amer­i­can tribe in or­der to avoid ju­di­cial scruti­ny of the patents.

Endpoints News

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.