The In­di­an multi­na­tion­al drug­mak­er Sun Phar­ma, along­side Is­rael’s Taro Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal In­dus­tries, is cash­ing out tens of mil­lions to set­tle a law­suit in a US fed­er­al court.

In a mo­tion dat­ed Thurs­day, fed­er­al judge Cyn­thia M. Rufe out of Penn­syl­va­nia’s east­ern dis­trict signed off on a set­tle­ment that would re­solve an­titrust lit­i­ga­tion in­volv­ing Sun Phar­ma and Taro Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals. The eight-page or­der de­tailed that the val­ue was set for $75 mil­lion, with the chance for an­oth­er $20 mil­lion to be added based on spe­cif­ic claus­es in the set­tle­ment agree­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to the fil­ing, a hear­ing was held Mar. 8 in or­der to de­ter­mine whether pro­posed class-ac­tion set­tle­ments would be “fair, rea­son­able and ad­e­quate.” And ac­cord­ing to the judge, the set­tle­ments met those cri­te­ria.

From the fil­ing:

Pre­lim­i­nar­i­ly, the Court finds that Sun and Taro caused time­ly no­tice of the set­tle­ments and re­lat­ed ma­te­ri­als to be sent to the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al of the Unit­ed States and the At­tor­neys Gen­er­al of all U.S. states, ter­ri­to­ries, and the Dis­trict of Co­lum­bia pur­suant to the Class Ac­tion Fair­ness Act of 2005 (“CAFA”). The Court finds that such no­ti­fi­ca­tion com­plies ful­ly with the ap­plic­a­ble re­quire­ments of CAFA.

As far as fed­er­al fil­ings in­di­cate, the case — In Re: Gener­ic Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals Pric­ing An­titrust Lit­i­ga­tion — in­volved ac­cu­sa­tions that Sun and Taro, among oth­ers, al­leged­ly took part in a scheme to fix gener­ic drug prices. In Re is a le­gal de­f­i­n­i­tion in the US that means a case does not for­mal­ly name the op­pos­ing par­ties in a law­suit.

The mas­sive dis­pute, which kicked off in 2016 and has al­most 2,400 en­tries in the US gov­ern­ment’s PAC­ER web­site, has plain­tiffs in­clud­ing more than a dozen coun­ties and five state gov­ern­ments: Penn­syl­va­nia, Cal­i­for­nia, South Car­oli­na, Arkansas and Mary­land.

Sun Phar­ma did not im­me­di­ate­ly re­spond to a query from End­points News.

It’s not Sun Phar­ma’s first time hav­ing to pay out a set­tle­ment. Last year, its gener­ic unit Ran­baxy was ac­cused of schem­ing to get ahead of ri­vals — mak­ing gener­ic ver­sions of Genen­tech, No­var­tis and Pfiz­er drugs, and se­cur­ing 180 days of ex­clu­siv­i­ty on the US mar­ket. Sun paid $485 mil­lion to set­tle the suit, with­out ad­mit­ting to the charges.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.

When Vigil Neuroscience filed its IPO papers in late 2021, the biotech revealed that the FDA had just cleared its Phase I trial — but with a partial clinical hold that limited dosing to under a certain level.

More than a year later, the FDA has lifted the hold.

Vigil is now free to dose VGL101, an antibody targeting TREM2, at levels higher than 20 mg/kg in its ongoing and future clinical trials in patients with adult-onset leukoencephalopathy with axonal spheroids and pigmented glia (ALSP), an inherited condition that affects the brain and spinal cord.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.