AWP Litigation -- In re Pharmaceutical Industry Average Wholesale Price Litigation

Drug prices have soared for years. One of the reasons for this is drug companies’ inflation of a benchmark called Average Wholesale Price or AWP. It turned out that AWP was neither an average, an average price, nor a wholesale price. Rather, it was an arbitrary number assigned by drug manufacturers which, through various manipulations, resulted in consumers and third party payors vastly overpaying for needed medications.Read more.

FDB/McKesson Litigation -- New England Carpenters Health Benefit Fund v. First DataBank, Inc. and McKesson Corp.

Court: U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts
Case No.: 1:05-CV-11148-PBS

Wexler Wallace was Co-Lead Counsel in this massive class action against pharmaceutical wholesaling giant McKesson Corporation (“McKesson”) and pharmaceutical pricing publisher First DataBank, Inc. (“FDB”).  Medispan, another pharmaceutical pricing publisher, was later named as a defendant in a separate case. The case addressed an unlawful 5% mark-up in the Average Wholesale Prices (“AWPs”) of various drugs, causing consumers and third party payors to overpay for pharmaceuticals. The case against McKesson settled for $350 million. In a separate settlement, FDB agreed to roll back AWPs, saving the Class many millions of dollars. Read more.

In re Actimmune Marketing Litigation

Court: United States District Court for the Northern District of California
Case No.: 3:08-CV-02376

Wexler Wallace is a member of the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee in a case against InterMune, Genentech, and InterMune’s former CEO Scott Harkonen.  The Complaint alleges that the Defendants instituted a fraudulent marketing campaign that claimed the drug Actimmune was effective for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a deadly lung disease, when in fact there is no known effective treatment. Read more.

In re Synthroid Marketing Litigation

Court: United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois
Case No.: MDL No. 1182

Filed originally by Ken Wexler’s previous firm, this case was successfully prosecuted on behalf of consumers of the pharmaceutical Synthroid against its brand name manufacturer.  The Synthroid case was one of the first, if not the first, cases brought against a brand name pharmaceutical manufacturer for attempting to suppress generic competition, a practice that significantly raises consumer drug prices.  The Synthroid case settled in 2000 for an aggregate amount of $87.4 million.