TRENTON, N.J. —Just three months before the world’s second-best-selling drug gets U.S. generic competition, a company has paid nearly $445 million to finally end a decade-long, twist-filled patent-infringement battle with two major drugmakers over blood thinner Plavix. Apotex, Canada’s biggest drugmaker, has paid Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi, the two brand-name drugmakers that jointly sell Plavix, $442.2 million in damages ordered over its improper sales of a generic version of Plavix in 2006.
Apotex also paid $1.26 million in interest on that judgment and another $900,000 in legal costs. The Plavix patent saga began with patent-challenging litigation in March 2002. It includes an illegal deal to delay sales of generic Plavix, a criminal antitrust investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, the ouster of a former Bristol CEO and an earlier probe over alleged inflation of sales figures.
By early 2006, New York-based Bristol-Myers and France’s Sanofi, then called Sanofi-Aventis, reached an out-of-court settlement to pay Apotex at least $40 million to delay selling generic Plavix until at least 2011. That’s when the primary patent for Plavix was to expire.
Federal authorities caught wind of the deal and started a criminal antitrust probe. In August 2006, Bristol-Myers disclosed FBI agents had raided its headquarters and confiscated documents, and that the company, some senior executives and Sanofi-Aventis all had been served grand jury subpoenas to produce additional documents. The Associated Press
