The US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania holds that reverse payments cases will proceed to discovery in a patent litigation in the pharmaceutical sector (Cephalon)

In the latest development in the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to challenge Hatch-Waxman patent litigation settlements, earlier this week a federal district court in Pennsylvania denied in part defendants’ motions to dismiss antitrust complaints challenging a series of such settlements. The court rejected the argument of the FTC and other plaintiffs that a settlement that includes a “reverse payment” from the patent holder to the generic entrant is a per se antitrust violation and adopted instead the “scope of the patent” standard followed by most other courts. Under that standard, the court concluded that plaintiffs had alleged sufficient facts that, if true, could establish that