Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

A federal appeals court found yesterday that Purdue Pharma had deliberately misled the government to win patent protection for its powerful painkiller OxyContin. The ruling, which makes patents on the drug not enforceable, opens the door to increased generic competition, as well as potentially huge legal awards against Purdue.

The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington is a victory for Endo Pharmaceuticals Holdings, which is seeking to market a generic form of OxyContin.

Shares of Endo, based in Chadds Ford, Pa., closed yesterday at $24.63, up $4.60. Purdue Pharma is privately held.

OxyContin is a time-release formulation of a long-used narcotic known as oxycodone. Over the last five years, its annual sales have averaged about $1.5 billion. The drug also gained notoriety because it was widely abused.

Purdue Pharma, a company based in Stamford, Conn., said yesterday that it believed that it had properly obtained patent protection for OxyContin and that it planned to seek to have the court's full panel of 12 judges hear an appeal.

"Purdue believes that the court's decision is contrary to principles of patent law," the company said.

Yesterday's appellate decision surprised some analysts and lawyers because it upheld the most critical and damaging portion of a trial court ruling against Purdue Pharma last year.

The ruling last year, by Judge Sidney H. Stein of United States District Court in Manhattan, found that Purdue Pharma had intentionally deceived patent officials to secure OxyContin's patent by implying that the company had clinical evidence to show that OxyContin was easier for doctors to use to control pain, when in fact such data did not exist. --NYT

You know, I find it crazy that the Patent Office doesn't, you know, ASK TO SEE the details of these things. I can look at Biotech and Software patents and see how messed up they are. I am willing to bet that this extends into the Pharma world too.

The problem is, while there is nothing wrong with the idea of a patent (except in the software world :P), the PTO is obviously incapable of having patent applications reviewed by experts in a field to validate that a company has what they say they have, to establish a prima facia statement of "novel and non-obvious" relative to the state of the art in a field. How could they have GOTTEN a patent without presenting their data? Of course, how do people get software patents without presenting an implementation?