Law Commons^™

The Pharma Barons: Corporate Law's Dangerous New Race To The Bottom In The Pharmaceutical Industry, Eugene Mccarthy

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

In this Article, I argue that drug companies have created a highly profitable but dangerous business model by employing the same legal tactics as the nineteenth-century “robber barons,” the group of financiers who orchestrated corporate law’s infamous race to the bottom. Like these historical financiers, drug company executives have captured the legal apparatus and regulatory bodies that oversee them. In so doing, they have transformed the law from a system of governance into a set of enabling doctrines. The pharmaceutical industry has turned legislation intended to protect the public into a legal justification for marketing ineffective and unsafe prescription drugs. …

Limiting State Flexibility In Drug Pricing, Nicholas Bagley, Rachel E. Sachs

Articles

Throughout the United States, escalating drug prices are putting immense pressure on state budgets. Several states are looking for ways to push back. Last year, Massachusetts asked the Trump administration for a waiver that would, among other things, allow its Medicaid program to decline to cover costly drugs for which there is limited or inadequate evidence of clinical efficacy. By credibly threatening to exclude such drugs from coverage, Massachusetts hoped to extract price concessions and constrain the fastest-growing part of its Medicaid budget.

Update On Antitrust And Pay-For-Delay: Evaluating “No Authorized Generic” And “Exclusive License” Provisions In Hatch-Waxman Settlements, Saami Zain

San Diego Law Review

In Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, the United States Supreme Court held that a patent litigation settlement where a branded drug company pays a generic drug company to end the litigation and delay launching its generic may violate the antitrust laws. Although the decision ended years of controversy over whether such settlements were subject to antitrust scrutiny, many issues remain unresolved concerning the lawfulness of these settlements. In particular, courts have struggled in assessing the legality of patent settlements between branded and generic drug manufacturers involving non-cash compensation or benefits. This article discusses one type of non-cash compensation that is …

Drug Approval In A Learning Health System, W. Nicholson Price

Articles

The current system of FDA approval seems to make few happy. Some argue FDA approves drugs too slowly; others too quickly. Many agree that FDA—and the health system generally—should gather information after drugs are approved to learn how well they work and how safe they are. This is hard to do. FDA has its own surveillance systems, but those systems face substantial limitations in practical use. Drug companies can also conduct their own studies, but have little incentive to do so, and often fail to fulfil study commitments made to FDA. Proposals to improve this dynamic often suggest gathering more …

Suggestions For State Laws On Biosimilar Substitution, Gary M. Fox

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Biologic drugs offer major advancements over small-molecule drugs when it comes to treating serious diseases. Biosimilars, which mimic innovative biologic drugs, have the potential to further revolutionize the practice of medicine. States now have decades of experience regulating the substitution of generic, small-molecule drugs for their brand-name equivalents. But the complexities of biologic drugs and biosimilars force states to confront novel scientific and legal issues. Many states have begun tackling those issues by passing laws that regulate when pharmacists may substitute biosimilars for their corresponding biologic drugs. Other states have yet to do so. This Note surveys five provisions common …

Improving Generic Drug Approval At The Fda, Kathleen Craddock

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Generic drugs are the store-brand cereal of the drug world. While they lack the vibrant colors of and exciting commercials behind name brands, generics are still effective. Most importantly, for some people, they make the difference between accessing essential treatment and going without. Getting generics to market as quickly as possible means fewer people will cut pills in half or skip doses to save money, which also saves billions of dollars across the U.S. health system. Because a new generic does not offer lifesaving changes for people with rare or complicated diseases, generics lack the “cultural capture of rhetoric about …

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, Jim Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Kathy Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Andrew Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Katharine Van Tassel

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Cancer's Ip, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

The state of publicly funded science is in peril. Instead, new biomedical research efforts — in particular, the recent funding of a “Cancer Moonshot” — have focused on employing public-private partnerships, joint ventures between private industry and public agencies, as being more politically palatable. Yet, public-private partnerships like the Cancer Moonshot center on the production of public goods: scientific information. Using private incentives in this context presents numerous puzzles for both intellectual property law and information policy. This Article examines whether—and to what extent — intellectual property and information policy can be appropriately tailored to the goals of public-private partnerships. …

Renovations Needed: The Fda's Floor/Ceiling Framework, Preemption, And The Opioid Epidemic, Michael R. Abrams

Michigan Law Review

The FDA’s regulatory framework for pharmaceuticals uses a “floor/ceiling” model: administrative rules set a “floor” of minimum safety, while state tort liability sets a “ceiling” of maximum protection. This model emphasizes premarket scrutiny but largely relies on the state common law “ceiling” to police the postapproval drug market. As the Supreme Court increasingly holds state tort law preempted by federal administrative standards, the FDA’s framework becomes increasingly imbalanced. In the face of a historic prescription medication overdose crisis, the Opioid Epidemic, this imbalance allows the pharmaceutical industry to avoid internalizing the public health costs of their opioid products. This Note …

The Uneasy Case For Patent Law, Rachel E. Sachs

Michigan Law Review

A central tenet of patent law scholarship holds that if any scientific field truly needs patents to stimulate progress, it is pharmaceuticals. Patents are thought to be critical in encouraging pharmaceutical companies to develop and commercialize new therapies, due to the high costs of researching diseases, developing treatments, and bringing drugs through the complex, expensive approval process. Scholars and policymakers often point to patent law’s apparent success in the pharmaceutical industry to justify broader calls for more expansive patent rights.

This Article challenges this conventional wisdom about the centrality of patents to drug development by presenting a case study of …

Scientific Trials--In The Laboratories, Not The Courts, Nicholas Bagley, Aaron E. Carroll, Pieter A. Cohen

Articles

In 2015, one of us published a peer-reviewed study, together with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, replicating prior research from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) detecting a designer stimulant, β-methylphenylethylamine, in sports, weight loss, and “cognitive function” supplements sold in the United States. The confirmatory study prompted the FDA to take enforcement action against companies selling the stimulant as a dietary ingredient. One of the companies that received an FDA warning letter sued the study’s authors for $200 million in damages for libel, claiming, without supporting scientific evidence, that multiple statements in the article were …

Preparing For The Apocalypse: A Multi-Prong Proposal To Develop Countermeasures For Biological, Chemical, Radiological, And Nuclear Threats, Constance E. Bagley, Anat Alon-Beck

Faculty Publications

The false alarm of an Hawaiian nuclear attack in January 2018 is an example of the lack of U.S. preparedness for attacks using nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. To address such threats, this Article proposes the establishment of a nation-wide integrated defense of health countermeasures initiative (“DHCI”), which is a multi-prong program to create a defensive triad comprising government, private industry, and academia to develop countermeasures for health threats posed by biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear (“BCRN”) attacks. Key elements of our multi-faceted proposal include the use of the government’s Other Transaction Authority to simplify procurement arrangements, the …

How Dreamland Colored My Summer Vacation And Thinking About The Opioid Epidemic, Elizabeth Leonard

Scholarly Works

Book Review of Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones,(2018).