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CVS Health Corp and its Omnicare unit were sued...by the U.S. government, which accused them of fraudulently billing Medicare and other programs for drugs for older and disabled people without valid prescriptions...The Department of Justice joined whistleblower litigation accusing Omnicare of violating the federal False Claims Act for illegally dispensing drugs to tens of thousands of patients in assisted living facilities, group homes for people with special needs, and other long-term care facilities...According to a civil complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Omnicare would often assign new numbers to prescriptions after the original prescriptions expired or ran out of refills...The government said this enabled Omnicare to bill Medicare Medicaid, and Tricare...for hundreds of thousands of drugs, under what the company internally called “rollover” prescriptions, from 2010 to 2018...READ MORE

Germany’s Bayer has agreed with plaintiffs to postpone its next two U.S. lawsuits over the alleged cancer-causing effects of its glyphosate-based weed killers to allow more time for talks on a settlement...The company, which is facing 42,700 U.S. plaintiffs, is widely expected to eventually buy itself out of the litigation, with analysts currently estimating the size of a future settlement at $8-$12 billion...Bayer agreed with the plaintiff to delay for about six months a case in the California Superior Court for Lake County scheduled for Jan. 15, a company spokesman said in a written statement...READ MORE

Read any newspaper and you will be confronted with articles to related to the opioid crisis. Whether the news is highlighting death related to overdoses, over-prescriptions, a medication grey market or doctors sending patients to pill mills, the focus is one: too many opioids are being prescribed and it’s time for pharmacists to take on additional roles in the national fight against opioid addiction and death. Several states have implemented new rules related to a pharmacy’s reporting obligations while other states, such as New York, are taking distribution companies to court...Currently, lawsuits are focusing on drug distributors like RDC and McKesson, which distribute opioid drugs to pharmacies who in turn disseminate those drugs to patients. But from 2017 to the present, several pharmacy owners have been jailed and fined millions of dollars for filling fake prescriptions...READ MORE

OxyContin is a dying business in the United States. Purdue Pharma, owned by the billionaire Sackler family, is collapsing under an avalanche of lawsuits that accuse the company of using false claims to push its blockbuster painkiller in the U.S., profiting as an unsuspecting nation slipped into a devastating drug crisis...Meanwhile, another company owned by the family in China has been promoting OxyContin with the same tactics Purdue was forced to abandon...the Sacklers’ Chinese affiliate, Mundipharma, tell doctors that time-release painkillers like OxyContin are less addictive than other opioids...Mundipharma has pushed ever larger doses of opioids…In China, Mundipharma managers tried to boost profits by requiring sales representatives to copy patients’ private medical records without consent, in apparent violation of Chinese law...As in the U.S., marketing materials in China made claims about OxyContin’s safety and effectiveness based on company-funded studies and outdated data that has been debunked...READ MORE

Two high-profile cases in the pharma world have featured similar headlines this month—and they're not flattering to the legal profession...In both instances, allegations of attorney misconduct have cropped up, shifting focus from the lawsuits themselves to the people arguing them...First, HIV advocates battling Gilead Sciences say a U.S. Patent & Trademark Office official harbored a pro-industry bias. And second, J&J lawyers say their counterparts in talc litigation stonewalled questions about expert testimony and otherwise played foul with the rules...READ MORE

The co-founders of Outcome Health and several former executives have been charged by the Department of Justice in a $1 billion fraud scheme targeting clients, lenders and investors...The DOJ...charging Rishi Shah and Shradha Agarwal, the co-founders...along with Brad Purdy, former chief operating officer and chief financial officer and Ashik Desai, former executive vice president of business operations...At the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission...added the executives to its civil complaint, alleging they falsely portrayed the company’s success to investors and auditors to the tune of $487 million...The DOJ filing alleges that from 2011 to 2017, the executives bilked mostly pharma companies by selling them “tens of millions of dollars of advertising inventory that did not exist.” The indictment claims the faux sales resulted in inflated financial statements that were then used to raise financing in 2016 and 2017...READ MORE

A Florida-based charity will pay $4 million to resolve claims that it acted as a conduit for companies including Biogen Inc and Novartis AG to pay kickbacks to Medicare patients using their high-priced multiple sclerosis drugs, the U.S. Justice Department said...The settlement with the patient assistance charity The Assistance Fund marked the third so far with a foundation linked to an industry-wide probe that has resulted in $850 million in settlements with drugmakers and charities...READ MORE

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co...said it won a $752 million jury verdict against Gilead Sciences Inc in a U.S. patent dispute relating to technology for treating cancer...A jury...awarded the damages after finding that Yescarta, a treatment sold by Gilead’s Kite Pharma unit, infringed on a patent exclusively licensed by Bristol-Myers’ Juno Therapeutics division...The patent at issue in the lawsuit...relates to CAR T-cell immunotherapy for cancer...READ MORE

When Insys founder John Kapoor was found guilty on federal racketeering charges...it marked the stiffest conviction yet for an opioid executive at the center of the nation's addiction crisis. Now, a federal judge says prosecutors failed to present enough evidence to support some of those claims—likely lowering Kapoor's sentence...Prosecutors failed to present evidence showing...Subsys to be prescribed to patients for nonmedical purposes...The order did not affect the sales fraud charges on which those executives were convicted as part of a long-running scheme to drive up prescriptions of Subsys by underselling the drug's addictive properties and capitalizing on patient titration...READ MORE

Martin Shkreli, the disgraced former CEO of Retrophin currently serving a seven-year sentence for securities fraud and conspiracy, was hoping for a SCOTUS Hail Mary after multiple appeals fell flat. Turns out the court wasn't interested in hearing Shkreli's pleas at all...The U.S. Supreme Court...denied hearing Shkreli's appeal to overturn his 2017 fraud conviction after his disastrous run as head of biotech Retrophin. Shkreli was also forced to forfeit $7.36 million in his conviction...READ MORE