According to information which reached BBC’s Newsnight, Gaviscon, a heartburn drug, continued monopolizing the UK market for much longer than it should have done, and cost the National Health Service (NHS) approximately £40 million extra ($78m) because of this.
Internal documents seemed to reveal that executives at Reckitt Benckiser deliberately placed obstacles to prevent generic copies of the drug from being produced and marketed. Newsnight reported that an ex-Reckitt senior executive had cheated the NHS out of millions of pounds. Gaviscon continued being sold to the NHS at three times the price of the generic cost.
Newsnight reported that Reckitt executives bragged about influencing regulatory authorities to slow down the approval for a generic name for Gaviscon. A generic name should have been introduced in 2000.
The generic name should have been published in 2000 but Reckitt opposed this. This plan to introduce a generic name and then face a Reckitt objection happened again and again till 2006. According to Reckitt, the objections were related to health and safety. However, according to secret internal documents, the process should be “drag(ged) out as long as possible” as millions of pounds of business was at stake.
The secret internal documents, which should have been shredded but weren’t, paint a picture of executives deliberately placing obstacles to trip up or slow down the introduction of generic competitors by manipulating regulatory authorities.
John Schmidt, a competition lawyer, told Newsnight there is now concern as to whether Reckitt had broken competition law. As the obstacles slowed down the introduction of generic competition, Reckitt worked on doctors to use another Gaviscon formulation whose patent life had not yet expired.
In fact, according to a 2005 PDF document “Reckitt Benckiser and Britannia Pharmaceuticals have been found to have breached the ABPI Code of Ethics in relation to their promotion of Gaviscon Advance. Specifically their representative(s) had said, or otherwise implied, to five practices in Glasgow that the Medicines Management Team supported switching patients from Gaviscon to Gaviscon Advance and that was untrue. The companies were found to be in breach of clause 7.2 (information and claims must not mislead, either directly or by implication) and clause 15.2 (reps must maintain a high standard of ethical conduct).”
Now, nearly a decade after the patent life for Gaviscon had expired, it still represents 88% of the NHS alginic acid compounds market. A generic name has not yet been introduced.
Reckitt Benckiser, in a press release wrote “We are shocked by the allegations made as Reckitt Benckiser is a responsible company in the way it conducts its business.”
Related Article
— Statement In Response To Media Reports About Gaviscon – Reckitt Benckiser Healthcare UK
Written by – Christian Nordqvist