Bioreg­num — The view from End­points News

Al­ler­gan CEO Brent Saun­ders scored some heavy­weight ku­dos last fall with a so­cial con­tract that con­demned preda­to­ry drug pric­ing by the likes of Mar­tin Shkre­li and out­lined the com­pa­ny’s com­mit­ment to R&D and ac­cess. But on Fri­day he squan­dered what­ev­er moral clout he may have earned along the way with a le­gal gam­bit that looked too clever by half.

Here’s what hap­pened:

Fac­ing a patent chal­lenge to its fran­chise drug Resta­sis, Al­ler­gan hand­ed over the patents to the St. Reg­is Mo­hawk Tribe, which has sov­er­eign im­mu­ni­ty against in­ter partes re­view chal­lenges. The tribe — best known for its casi­no ops — hand­ed back an ex­clu­sive li­cense to the drug, col­lect­ed $13.75 mil­lion and can look for­ward to mil­lions more in roy­al­ties each year, un­less the courts toss it all out as a cyn­i­cal ploy cooked up by at­tor­neys.

This had all the in­gre­di­ents any re­porter looks for in an at­ten­tion-grab­bing sto­ry.

1. Toss in a phar­ma com­pa­ny at a time the in­dus­try is tagged with a rep for greed and a weak grasp of ethics.
2. Add a le­gal ma­neu­ver that looked like it came from the of­fice of Break­ing Bad’s Saul Good­man.
3. Stir in some protests from the tribe that casi­no gam­bling doesn’t of­fer a se­cure enough rev­enue stream to guar­an­tee their fu­ture in­come.

What you get are some fresh­ly baked goods from a long line of pub­li­ca­tions, in­clud­ing the New York Times, the Wall Street Jour­nal, CN­BC, etc., etc., etc.

“I be­lieve it’s nov­el,” Al­ler­gan CEO Brent Saun­ders told CN­BC. “The ac­tions to­day re­al­ly al­low us to fo­cus the de­fense of the Resta­sis patents in the fed­er­al court sys­tem and avoid the dou­ble jeop­ardy cre­at­ed by the IPR sys­tem.”

A car sales­man I knew in Texas once told me if it doesn’t look good in a head­line, don’t do it.

Al­ler­gan just vault­ed that line.

The tribe, mean­while, is of­fer­ing its patent pro­tec­tion ser­vices to any­one else in the phar­ma in­dus­try that would like to shift their patents to their pro­tect­ed trib­al lands — in ex­change for a hefty fee of course.

Im­age: Brent Saun­ders Get­ty

Discovery Life Sciences has acquired what claims to be the Maryland-based host of the world’s largest hepatocyte inventory, known as IVAL, to help researchers select more effective and safer drug candidates in the future.

The combined companies will now serve a wider range of drug research and development scientists, according to Albert Li, who founded IVAL in 2004 and is set to join the Discovery leadership team as the CSO of pharmacology and toxicology.

Researchers may be nearing an answer for the mysterious and life-threatening blood clots that appeared on very rare occasions in people who received the J&J or AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.

The new work builds on an early hypothesis researchers in Norway put forward last spring, when the cases first cropped up. They proposed the events were similar to blood clots that can occur in a small subset of patients who receive heparin, one of the most commonly used blood thinners.