Johnson & Johnson Faces Antitrust Suit Over Dominating Infliximab Drug

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Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and subsidiary Janssen Biotech, Inc. are facing an antitrust lawsuit alleging that they protected their monopoly on biologic medications by illegally coercing insurance companies and healthcare providers to enter into exclusionary contracts and forcing out potential competition that would have driven down the price of their product.

The suit centers around J&J’s infliximab drug, Remicade, which the suit claims is “among the best selling drugs in the world” and costs about $4,000 per dose. The complaint claims that Remicade was the only infliximab product on the market until 2016, when Pfizer allegedly launched its biosimilar medicine Inflectra and began selling it at a price that was 15 percent less than Remicade.

The complaint alleges that upon the entrance of a competitor, the defendants then implemented a plan to suppress Pfizer’s product and raise prices of their infliximab medicine by bullying insurance companies and healthcare providers into signing contracts promising they would only insure and purchase Remicade as opposed to its competitors, despite its more expensive price. The contracts allegedly offered enticing rebates and bundling packages that would impose “a significant financial penalty” on parties that denied the offer.

According to the suit, J&J has persuaded “most major health insurers” – about 70 percent of the market – to sign its contracts. Pfizer reportedly claims that its infliximab product is “eligible for reimbursement only in circumstances so limited as to be practically non-existent,” the complaint reads. As a result, health providers have allegedly become hesitant to buy Inflectra due to a risk of not receiving reimbursement from insurance companies. The suit claims that as of September 1, 2017, in fact, approximately 90 percent of healthcare providers that stock infliximab “purchased no Inflectra at all.”

The suit argues that as a result of the defendants’ allegedly anticompetitive behavior, consumers are presented with fewer medical options and unfairly forced to pay a higher price for needed medicine.