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Attorneys general from more than 40 states are alleging the nation's largest generic drug manufacturers conspired to artificially inflate and manipulate prices for more than 100 different generic drugs...filed in federal court in Connecticut, also names 15 individual senior executives responsible for sales, marketing and pricing...Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong...said investigators obtained evidence implicating 20 firms..."We have hard evidence that shows the generic drug industry perpetrated a multibillion-dollar fraud on the American people," Tong said. "We have emails, text messages, telephone records and former company insiders that we believe will prove a multiyear conspiracy to fix prices and divide market share for huge numbers of generic drugs."...READ MORE

Indivior Plc lost nearly three-quarters of its stock market value...and former parent Reckitt Benckiser also fell after the U.S. Justice Department accused the British drugmaker of illegally boosting prescriptions for its blockbuster opioid addiction treatment Suboxone...An indictment...alleged Indivior made billions of dollars by deceiving doctors and healthcare benefit programs into believing the film version of Suboxone was safer and less susceptible to abuse than similar drugs...The indictment charged Indivior and its subsidiary Indivior Inc with conspiracy, health care fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud. The U.S. government said it would seek to have it forfeit at least $3 billion...READ MORE

Three drugmakers will pay $122.6 million to resolve claims they used charities that help cover Medicare patients’ out-of-pocket drug costs as a way to pay kickbacks aimed at encouraging use of their medications, including some expensive ones...The U.S. Justice Department...said Jazz Pharmaceuticals Plc, Lundbeck A/S and Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc had become the latest companies to settle claims stemming from an industry-wide probe of drugmakers’ financial support of patient assistance charities...The government has alleged in earlier settlements that drugmakers used such charities as a means to improperly pay the copay obligations of Medicare patients using their drugs in violation of the Anti-Kickback Statute...READ MORE

Novartis AG must face a U.S. government lawsuit accusing it of paying millions of dollars in kickbacks to doctors so they would prescribe its drugs, after a federal judge ruled in a decision...that the government had offered evidence of a “company-wide kickback scheme.”...U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe in Manhattan also rejected the Swiss drugmaker’s bid to keep key government evidence out of the case, and ruled that the government does not have to prove a direct “quid pro quo” agreement between Novartis and doctors for the company to be liable...READ MORE

The founder of Insys Therapeutics Inc on Thursday became the highest-ranking pharmaceutical executive to be convicted in a case tied to the U.S. opioid crisis, when he and four colleagues were found guilty of participating in a scheme to bribe doctors to prescribe an addictive painkiller...A federal jury in Boston found John Kapoor, the drugmaker’s former chairman, and his co-defendants guilty of racketeering conspiracy for engaging in a scheme that also misled insurers into paying for the drug...READ MORE

The U.S. Supreme Court...cast aside pharmaceutical company Allergan Plc’s unorthodox bid to shield patents from a federal administrative court’s review by transferring them to a Native American tribe...The justices left in place a lower court ruling upholding the authority of a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office tribunal to decide the validity of patents covering Allergan’s dry eye drug Restasis, refusing to hear the company’s appeal. Allergan had argued that the tribe’s sovereign status under federal law made the patents immune from administrative review by the agency...Allergan, which has its headquarters in Dublin, in September 2017 transferred the patents to New York’s Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which took legal ownership of the patents and then licensed them back to Allergan in exchange for ongoing payments...Allergan said it was protecting itself from the patent court, which it called a flawed and biased forum...READ MORE

The founder of Insys Therapeutics Inc put profits over patients’ safety by bribing doctors to prescribe an addictive fentanyl spray, fueling the U.S. opioid epidemic, a federal prosecutor said...at the end of a landmark trial...John Kapoor, who served as the drugmaker’s chairman, and four colleagues are the first executives of a painkiller manufacturer to face trial for conduct that authorities say was tied to a drug abuse epidemic that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year...He (Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathaniel Yeager) said Kapoor also sought to defraud insurers into paying for Subsys and carried out the scheme with the help of his co-defendants, former Insys executives and managers Michael Gurry, Richard Simon, Sunrise Lee and Joseph Rowan...All five have pleaded not guilty to racketeering conspiracy...READ MORE

The FDA has been coordinating a recall of adulterated heart medications since last July...Dozens of lawsuits have been filed against drug makers and sellers over widely prescribed generic heart medications tainted with potential carcinogens, the first claims in what some lawyers expect to be a wave of litigation...the carcinogen NDMA was discovered in valsartan manufactured by Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical Co. The contaminated valsartan was sold to a number of major drugmakers and used as an ingredient in other popular cardiovascular therapies...Zhejiang Huahai and its affiliates are the primary targets of the lawsuits. Other companies named in the complaints include generic-drug giants Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. and Mylan NV, as well as CVS Health Corp., which operates large pharmacy and drug-benefit management businesses. Almost 40 defendants have been sued so far...READ MORE

A physician ally of Purdue Pharma LP...has agreed to testify against the OxyContin maker and other drug companies, newly disclosed court records show...Dr. Russell Portenoy, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, was an early advocate for the use of opioids for chronic pain...He also was named as a defendant in some of the lawsuits filed by cities, counties and states seeking to hold opioid makers - including Endo and Mallinckrodt Plc...But Portenoy...struck a deal with the plaintiffs to serve as a cooperating witness, the records show. In exchange for his dismissal from the suits, Portenoy provided the plaintiffs with documentation of opioid makers’ payments to him over the years, as well as a 36-page declaration that lays out what he would say on the witness stand...READ MORE

As Purdue Pharma grapples with thousands of lawsuits blaming the company for contributing to the opioid crisis, the drug maker has signaled it may file bankruptcy. If that happens, some newly created subsidiaries are likely to come under scrutiny...Purdue has launched two limited partnerships that are now marketing or developing drugs that were previously listed as part of the Purdue product portfolio. Several current and former Purdue executives run these companies, both of which the drug maker refers to as operating subsidiaries...The timing of all these activities — from creating the subsidiaries to transferring assets and employees — could be an issue for Purdue and the Sacklers, since these occurred not long before the drug maker indicated bankruptcy is a possibility...READ MORE