By Kurt R. Karst – Each year, thousands – indeed, tens of thousands – of pages are written concerning the Hatch-Waxman Amendments. As we were clearing out our in-box this past weekend, we came across two scholarly articles from some Hatch-Waxman “regulars” that we think merit …
By Kurt R. Karst – In what is, to our knowledge, the first instance in which a company has asserted the patent delisting counterclaim provisions added by the Medicare Modernization Act (“MMA”) in the context of a 505(b)(2) application – and even in the context of …
By Kurt R. Karst – On March 7th, the U.S. Supreme Court denied yet another Petition for Writ of Certiorari concerning whether patent settlement agreements (what opponents call “pay-for-delay” agreements or “reverse payments”) are unlawful and violate the antitrust laws. As we previously reported, the case, …
By Kurt R. Karst – FDA’s Unapproved Drugs Initiative, which began in June 2006 when the Agency issued its final version of “Marketed Unapproved Drugs – Compliance Policy Guide Sec. 440.100,” took a major step with the Agency’s March 2, 2011 announcement that FDA plans to …
By Kurt R. Karst – Midnight, March 4, 2011 – that’s the time and date on which the federal government will close for business if Congress fails to approve a spending bill, or a short-term/stopgap funding measure that would likely just delay a shutdown for a …
By Susan J. Matthees – In an interesting twist in a developing story on the importation of thiopental, a drug used to administer the death penalty by lethal injection, the attorney for Georgia death row inmate Andrew Grant DeYoung sent Attorney General Eric Holder a …
By Carrie S. Martin – In a draft guidance issued on February 28, 2011, called “Medication Guides – Distribution Requirements and Inclusion in Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Services (REMS),” FDA proposes: (1) to implement a procedure that allows applicants with a REMS to request eliminating a …
By Kurt R. Karst – In a win for compounding pharmacies and a loss for FDA, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled last week in Med. Ctr. Pharmacy v. Holder that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas violated …
By Kurt R. Karst – It was just yesterday that we commented on how folks in the Hatch-Waxman community have been patiently awaiting FDA’s decision on an October 2010 citizen petition (Docket No. FDA-2010-P-0545) requesting that the Agency not approve any ANDA for a generic …
By Kurt R. Karst – As folks in the Hatch-Waxman community patiently await FDA’s decision on an October 2010 citizen petition (Docket No. FDA-2010-P-0545) requesting that the Agency not approve any ANDA for a generic version of XYZAL (levocetirizine dihydrochloride) with skinny labeling that omits, via …
By Kurt R. Karst – Last week, substantively identical legislation was introduced in both the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate to amend the FDC Act to prohibit the manufacture, marketing, sale, or distribution of an authorized generic version of an NDA-approved drug …
By Kurt R. Karst – The tome that is the President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2012 is chock-full of new proposals that, if implemented, would significantly affect both brand-name and generic drug manufacturers. What first caught our attention were some statements in an overview of the proposed …
By Kurt R. Karst – Late last year, Impax Laboratories, Inc. (“Impax”) filed a Complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey seeking a judgment with respect to U.S. Patent No. 6,911,217 (“the ‘217 patent”). The ‘217 patent is one of four …
By Susan J. Matthees – Six inmates on death row in three different states sued FDA in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over the importation of thiopental sodium, one of the drugs used by some states to administer a lethal injection. The …
By Kurt R. Karst – The ANDA backlog in FDA’s Office of Generic Drugs (“OGD”) continued to grow unabated in 2010. OGD started out the year with a backlog of 1963 original applications and ended the year up almost 400 applications, for a grand total of …
