“Unfair lawsuit despite knowing that the patent is not infringing”
The fact of manipulation of experimental data was also detected.
The Fair Trade Commission announced on the 3rd that it plans to impose a penalty of 2.297 billion won on Daewoong Pharmaceutical and sue the corporation to the prosecution. It is alleged that the company filed a lawsuit even though he knew that the company’s patent rights were not infringed, preventing competitors from selling generic drugs.
According to the FTC, Daewoong Pharmaceutical, which holds the patent right for the gastrointestinal drug’Albis’, filed a lawsuit against its rival Pavis Pharmaceutical in December 2014 for the prohibition of patent infringement. Daewoong Pharmaceutical knew that Pavis Pharmaceutical’s generics did not infringe on patents, but the FTC’s judgment is that it filed an’intentional lawsuit’ for fears that its drug sales could be disadvantageous when bidding for large hospitals.
When loss was expected in the course of the lawsuit, Daewoong Pharmaceutical also implemented a strategy to delay the lawsuit, such as submitting a large number of experimental reports that were not related to the lawsuit. In the end, Daewoong Pharmaceutical lost in May 2015 because it could not prove patent infringement, and Pavis Pharmaceutical was interrupted in business for several months.
The FTC also discovered that Daewoong Pharmaceutical has inflated the data of the bioequivalence test from 3 to 5 when applying for a patent for Albis D, the successor to Albis. The FTC revealed that the success data were also fabricated from 1 to 3 cases. Employees expressed pressure by sending and receiving e-mails such as’If you don’t apply in January, you’ll die if you don’t apply for a patent even when the product’s expected release date approaches’ I also did.
Daewoong Pharmaceutical again filed a patent infringement lawsuit in December 2016 in order to hinder sales when the generic of Ankuk Pharm came out even though it received a patent by manipulating data.
Im Gyeong-hwan, head of the knowledge industry supervisor of the Fair Trade Commission, said, “If you accuse the prosecution of a corporation, I think the prosecution will not only see the violation of the Fair Trade Act but also the violation of the patent law.”
Reporter Jihoon Lee [email protected]
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