Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12887

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Goldstein J.
Amgen Compares Roche to ‘Snake-Oil Salesman’
The Wall Street Journal 2008 Feb 19
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/02/19/amgen-compares-roche-to-snake-oil-salesman/

Full text:

Nothing spices up a patent dispute like a little name-calling. So we were eager to read Amgen’s filing today in its patent case against Roche, after we got a juicy tip from Dow Jones Newswires’ Thomas Gryta about it.

“With all the sincerity of a snake-oil salesman, Roche hyped its infringing product as a purportedly ‘new’ medicine conferring a different medical benefit,” Amgen says in the document. “But Roche’s own documents show that … its infringing product delivers at best ‘non-inferior’ or ‘comparable’ results.” (To read the whole document, click here.)

The companies are fighting over Mircera, a Roche anemia drug that would compete with Amgen’s Epogen. A jury ruled last year that the drug would infringe on Amgen’s Epogen patents. Last month, Roche proposed paying Amgen a royalty on Mircera sales twice that paid by Johnson & Johnson to sell a rival anemia drug.

Amgen’s response, from today’s filing: “The only thing more astonishing than Roche’s false assertions of its public interests is its chutzpah now in proposing that the Court order a license at a royalty rate of 20%,” which Amgen calls “grossly inadequate.”

Roche doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation, spokeswoman Linda Dyson told the Health Blog. But she said Roche stands by its royalty proposal. “We feel that it’s fair,” she said.