June 5, 2002 – The Virgin Islands has joined 24 other states and territories in suing the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb over what the jurisdictions call unfair pricing of the cancer-fighting drug Taxol.
Attorney General Iver Stridiron joined the top legal officials of the other jurisdictions in bringing the lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., according to a press release Tuesday from the V.I. Justice Department.
The active ingredient in Taxol is paclitaxel, an agent developed at the federally funded National Cancer Institute to fight ovarian, breast and a variety of other cancers, Stridiron said. In 1992, the federal government gave Bristol-Myers a five-year exclusive contract to market Taxol.
The attorneys general allege that Bristol-Myers fraudulently gained patents on Taxol that kept other brands off the market after the five-year exclusive contract was up. Because of the lack of competition, the company was able to keep prices for the cancer-fighting drug far higher than they would have been otherwise, Stridiron stated.
Taxol has earned the company more than $5.4 billion since 1998, when the exclusive contract to sell Taxol expired, Stridiron said.
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