Since its in-depth inquiry into the pharmaceutical industry in 2008-2009, the European Commission (the “Commission”) has monitored patent settlement agreements. In its 2014 report published on 2 December 2015, the Commission revealed the results of its analysis of 76 patent settlement agreements between originators and generics (a number “far below” the figures of previous years), concluding that “the number of settlements that might attract competition law scrutiny remains at a low level”. In fact, 88% of the settlements analysed fell into categories that the Commission considered prima facie do not require competition law scrutiny (para. 51).
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Lundbeck
Merck and Generics UK challenge the Commission’s ‘by object’ analysis in Lundbeck
By Inside EU Life Sciences on
Posted in Competition, Pharmaceutical companies
On Thursday the General Court (the “GC”) held the first two hearings in the Lundbeck case.
Generics UK, now part of the Mylan group, and its former parent Merck KGaA (“Merck”) challenged the European Commission’s (the “Commission”) analysis, arguing that the Commission had wrongfully concluded that Generics UK’s settlement agreement with Danish originator Lundbeck restricted competition ‘by object’, such that it infringed article 101(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (“TFEU”).
Unlike its subsequent analysis in Servier where the Commission analysed by the ‘object’ and ‘effect’ of the agreements, in Lundbeck the Commission did not analyse the effects of the parties’ conduct.…
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