Te­va and Al­ler­gan have reached set­tle­ments with mul­ti­ple states over their in­volve­ment in the opi­oid cri­sis. Their lat­est is worth 9 fig­ures.

West Vir­ginia at­tor­ney gen­er­al Patrick Mor­risey an­nounced the newest set­tle­ment, worth $161.5 mil­lion, at a press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day. The deal would re­solve claims that the com­pa­nies helped fu­el the state’s opi­oid epi­dem­ic. If it goes through, it could be­come the largest state-ne­go­ti­at­ed set­tle­ment in West Vir­ginia’s his­to­ry, ac­cord­ing to Reuters.

The set­tle­ment would ef­fec­tive­ly end a tri­al that’s been go­ing on for the last two months in Kanawha Coun­ty Cir­cuit Court, as those two com­pa­nies were the last de­fen­dants re­main­ing. The com­pa­nies did not ad­mit any wrong­do­ing as part of the set­tle­ment.

“This set­tle­ment, along with oth­er set­tle­ments we will re­ceive from oth­er cas­es, will pro­vide sig­nif­i­cant help to those af­fect­ed the most by the opi­oid cri­sis in West Vir­ginia,” Mor­risey said in a state­ment.

Te­va and Al­ler­gan are fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of J&J and En­do, which set­tled with the state ear­li­er this year. West Vir­ginia had ac­cused the de­fen­dants of mis­rep­re­sent­ing the risk of opi­oids.

Most re­cent­ly, Te­va and Al­ler­gan signed a set­tle­ment with Flori­da along­side En­do and CVS. Te­va has al­so reached an agree­ment with Louisiana, Texas and Rhode Is­land over the past few months.

As for Te­va’s end of the deal, the com­pa­ny has agreed to pay West Vir­ginia $75 mil­lion over the next 15 years, along with $8 mil­lion in at­tor­neys’ fees and tri­al costs. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Te­va will pro­vide $27 mil­lion worth of Nar­can over the next 10 years.

While Te­va did not im­me­di­ate­ly re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment, the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment that “to­day’s set­tle­ment with the state of West Vir­ginia is an­oth­er crit­i­cal step for­ward in get­ting life-sav­ing treat­ments to peo­ple suf­fer­ing from ad­dic­tion to opi­oids. This set­tle­ment agree­ment is not an ad­mis­sion of any li­a­bil­i­ty or wrong­do­ing, and the Com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to ac­tive­ly ne­go­ti­ate a na­tion­al set­tle­ment.”

Speak­ing of that com­mit­ment to pur­sue a na­tion­al set­tle­ment — one that was echoed by Te­va CEO Kåre Schultz ear­li­er this year and was thought to be with­in reach by Feb­ru­ary 2023 — Bloomberg re­port­ed just a few weeks ago that both Te­va and Al­ler­gan were open to set­tling more than 3,500 law­suits for over $5 bil­lion, but those com­pa­nies re­main tight-lipped as ne­go­ti­a­tions con­tin­ue.

Prescription drug discount provider GoodRx will no longer be allowed to share its users’ sensitive health data with advertisers after the Federal Trade Commission charged the online coupon provider with failing to notify consumers of such disclosures to Facebook, Google, and other companies.

GoodRx agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty for violating the FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule after the FTC said it repeatedly violated a 2017 promise to not share sensitive personal health information. The FTC alleged that the company shared users’ prescription medications and personal health conditions with third party advertisers and platforms like Facebook, Google, Criteo, Branch and Twilio.

German mRNA player BioNTech opened the doors to a new manufacturing facility on Thursday, this one just about 75 miles north of its headquarters in Mainz, Germany.

BioNTech announced on Thursday that it has completed the construction of its first plasmid DNA manufacturing facility in Marburg, Germany. The facility will produce materials for mRNA-based vaccines and therapies along with cell therapies.

With Novo Nordisk’s obesity treatment Wegovy fully back in stock in December, sales are beginning to soar, the Danish pharma reported during its annual earnings call on Wednesday. Total scripts of the glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) Wegovy topped 37,000 weekly in mid-January, a hockey stick uptick from end-of-year levels below 15,000 per week.

The new prescriptions come on top of the overall momentum of Novo obesity drug sales in 2022, although the then supply-constrained Wegovy was only part of that. Sibling obesity med Saxenda accounted for DKK 10.7 billion ($1.58 billion) of the total DKK 16.9 billion ($2.49 billion), or about 63%, in Novo Nordisk’s reported obesity segment sales.