Motivated by the recent focus of the European Commission on disparagement cases (e.g. its investigation into Teva’s conduct in Copaxone and the Vifor case), a panel including Deepaloke Chatterjee, Elina Koustoumpardi, and Anna Neill discussed non-price abuses in pharma and whether they will become a new frontier.
The discussion focused on the following non-price conducts:
- Disparagement (i.e. dominant firms engaging on misleading communications with regards to the safety or efficacy of competing products to hamper their take up)
- Under what conditions does product hopping or incremental innovations constitute an abuse
- Refusals to offer samples to generic manufacturers wishing to prove bioequivalence under the pre-text of REMs in the US
