Yesterday Shire disclosed an agreement with Barr Laboratories, a US company which had been threatening to start selling a copycat version of Adderall XR, a treatment for American children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Jeremy Warner in The Independent writes:
"Shire's Matthew Emmens is either being very smart or very stupid in the way he has settled an ongoing patent dispute with Barr Pharmaceuticals.
Certainly the chief executive of Britain's third-largest pharmaceuticals company is being quite brave, for the US Federal Trade Commission has begun to take a particularly jaundiced view of such transactions, which it regards as a form of commercial collusion."
Matt Emmens, the chief executive of Shire, said that no payments are being made to Barr. "It is a no-no to pay someone off," he said, so the deal had been structured to be "FTC-friendly".
But the deal does look, to Insider's non-legal eyes, a bit like payment in kind for agreeing not launch a generic competitor.
Some analysts have voiced fears that the deal could become bogged down with the Federal Trade Commission, which has taken a tough line against some deals between branded pharmaceuticals firms and generic manufacturers.
Indeed, BMS is now under investigation by the Department of Justice's competition arm for trying to hold off cut-price competition to its heart drug Plavix.
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