Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court left intact a ruling that lets Merck & Co. block Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. from selling a generic form of the brain-cancer drug Temodar until 2013.
The justices today turned away an appeal by Teva’s Barr Laboratories and Barr Pharmaceuticals units, which contended that a Merck patent protecting the drug was unenforceable. A U.S. appeals court had rejected that argument.
The two sides agreed last year that if Merck and its Schering unit won the court fight, Teva could begin selling copies of Temodar in August 2013, six months before the patent expires. The legal fight also affects Perrigo Co., which will eventually supply the active ingredient for Teva’s version.
Temodar, approved by U.S. regulators in 1999, generated $704 million in global sales during the first nine months of this year.
A federal trial judge last year ruled against Schering and its British licensor Cancer Research Technology Ltd., saying they took too long to pursue the patent and didn’t provide sufficient information to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit then reversed that decision, saying no one was harmed from the nine- plus years it took Cancer Research to obtain the patent. The panel also ruled that the inventor hadn’t intended to deceive the patent office when he failed to disclose a paper he had written about the compound.
Merck, based in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, is the second-largest U.S. drugmaker by revenue behind Pfizer Inc. Teva, the world’s biggest generic-drug company, is based in Petah Tikva, Israel.
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