A federal judge has order Watson CEO Paul Bisaro to comply with an FTC subpoena for a case involving a patent settlement between the generic drugmaker and Cephalon ($CEPH) over the narcolepsy drug Provigil.
The FTC wants Bisaro's testimony regarding a 2006 deal between Cephalon and several drugmakers, including Watson, to determine if Cephalon tried to protect its narcolepsy drug Provigil from generic competition. Bisaro had been fighting the FTC's subpoena seeking his testimony, accusing the FTC of trying to bully Watson into trading away its exclusivity on a generic form of Provigil. He claimed that the FTC used FDA data to try to force the company to sell its Provigil rights to Apotex, another generic drugmaker.
Though Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly notes that the FTC's comments regarding Apotex may have been inappropriate, she shot down Bisaro's objection to the subpoena. In the ruling, Kollar-Kotelly noted that Bisaro he failed to demonstrate that the subpoena "would be burdensome at all, let alone unduly so."
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