Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

MNTA re Teva’s withdrawn Copaxone claim:

According to Leerink Swann, court documents indicate that Teva handed over manufacturing information about Copaxone years ago to a Momenta (MNTA) partner. As a result, the firm thinks that Momenta will be able to more easily create a product that is pharmaceutically equivalent to Copaxone but is not covered by Teva's (TEVA) patent.

When I first heard that Teva was making this claim in Mar 2009, I questioned whether the claim might backfire by sending an implicit message to the FDA that MNTA’s Copaxone was truly the same as Teva’s. From #msg-36601639:

…this [claim] might be an instance of the Chinese fortune-cookie proverb that says, “Be careful what you ask for—you may get it!”

If the FDA were to gain access to Teva’s court pleadings and it found Teva’s argument persuasive that NVS stole Teva’s Copaxone trade secrets, wouldn’t this make the FDA more likely to think that NVS/MNTA’s generic Copaxone was approvable?

Inasmuch as Teva has now withdrawn the claim of stolen IP from the Copaxone litigation, perhaps they concur with the above reasoning.