Medicare on Monday proposed limiting coverage of the anemia medicines that are the backbone of Amgen's historically stellar growth, accounting for almost half of the Thousand Oaks company's sales.
If Medicare follows through on its proposal, sales of the drugs, which have been slipping in recent months, would most certainly suffer. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' acting administrator, Leslie Norwalk, estimated that federal reimbursements would fall by as much as 10%.
To add to their woes Amgen, the world's largest biotechnology company, also lost a U.S. Supreme Court bid to bolster patent protection for the anemia medicines that account for almost half its sales.
The justices, without comment, today turned away the company's appeal in a decade-old legal fight with Shire and Sanofi-Aventis over patents that cover Amgen's Epogen treatment. A successful appeal would have helped Amgen in a separate bid to keep a Roche anemia drug, known as Cera, off the U.S. market.
More at Bloomberg and The LA Times
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