Alexandra Valenti, JD: Common Features of Lawsuits Filed Against AbbVie Over Humira
Alexandra Valenti, JD, associate at Goodwin, discusses common features of some recent high-profile class-action lawsuits over AbbVie’s Humira.
Transcript
So, the cases typically allege antitrust violations based on 2 features of what’s happened with AbbVie’s Humira adalimumab product. The first is AbbVie’s acquiring a very large patent estate covering that product. Well over 100 patents covering the 1 product. There’s allegations that those patents are very similar to each other, have overlapping claims, and lead to a kind of improper monopoly over the adalimumab Humira product.
The other piece is the settlement agreements that we’ve mentioned a couple of times already. AbbVie has settled with 8 different biosimilar manufacturers concerning their adalimumab products. And under those agreements, most of those products are already available in the European Market but won’t enter the US market until a staggered set of dates in 2023, and so the antitrust allegations are based on that state of affairs, alleging that AbbVie has improperly kind of orchestrated the biosimilar competition and staged it in such a way that biosimilar competition won’t enter the market until much [later] than it would have otherwise.
