An­gry Pfiz­er ac­cus­es J&J of vi­o­lat­ing an­titrust laws in safe­guard­ing a megablock­buster fran­chise

By most ac­counts, Pfiz­er was on the verge of in­flict­ing some se­ri­ous pain on J&J’s fran­chise drug Rem­i­cade when it rolled out a biosim­i­lar of the megablock­buster drug in the US last year. But the com­pe­ti­tion from knock­offs bare­ly dent­ed sales, and now Pfiz­er is claim­ing in a fed­er­al law­suit that its Big Phar­ma ri­val owes its suc­cess to mo­nop­o­lis­tic sales prac­tices.

Pfiz­er is tack­ling J&J in the US Dis­trict Court for the East­ern Dis­trict of Penn­syl­va­nia, where it al­leges that its phar­ma ri­val em­ployed “ex­clu­sion­ary con­tracts and oth­er an­ti­com­pet­i­tive prac­tices (which) have de­nied U.S. pa­tients ac­cess to ther­a­peu­tic op­tions and un­der­mined the ben­e­fits of ro­bust price com­pe­ti­tion in the in­no­v­a­tive and grow­ing bi­o­log­ics mar­ket­place for pa­tients,” ac­cord­ing to a state­ment from the com­pa­ny.

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