Two months after Bristol Myers Squibb fended off a lawsuit which accused the drugmaker of using illegal tactics to protect its monopoly on multiple myeloma medicine Pomalyst, BMS is back in court, facing similar allegations from insurance giant Cigna over its strategy with the same treatment.
Tuesday in Manhattan, health insurance giant Cigna filed a 203-page lawsuit accusing BMS of using anticompetitive tactics to extend its market exclusivity of Pomalyst. BMS allegedly did this “through a pattern of fraud on the U.S. patent office, by abuse of the federal judicial system and by eventually settling with generic competitors for extended delay of generic entry for years through agreements that protect unlawful supra-competitive pricing,” Cigna said in the complaint.
Pomalyst was originally approved in 2013 and is not expected to face generic competition until next year. In 2024, the product generated revenue of $3.5 billion worldwide, including sales of $2.7 billion in the U.S.
Also named in the lawsuit is BMS subsidiary Celgene, which developed Pomalyst and brought it to the market. Much of the misconduct alleged by Cigna dates to before BMS acquired Celgene in a $74 billion deal in 2019.
By keeping generics off the market, BMS forced Cigna and other payers to spend “many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars,” more than they should have, according to the lawsuit.
According to Cigna, in acquiring patents for Pomalyst, Celgene never disclosed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) that a doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital had already patented the use of the active ingredient in Pomalyst to treat multiple myeloma.
Celgene also allegedly acquired bogus patents—allowing it to extend its market exclusivity—by claiming it had solved stability issues with the main ingredient. Cigna alleges that scientists had already addressed the stability problems “through routine optimization for decades.”
The company also filed sham patent infringement lawsuits, Cigna said, which had little chance of succeeding but bought extra time to extend Pomalyst’s market exclusivity.
It’s a similar set of allegations that were laid out in a 2023 class action lawsuit against BMS, which was led by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana. In April of this year, that lawsuit was dismissed in U.S. court in New York by Judge Edgardo Ramos, who ruled that the claimants failed to show that BMS used an unlawful scheme to gain illegitimate patents and file sham lawsuits against generic drugmakers to maintain its monopoly.
As in the previous lawsuit, Cigna is seeking a jury trial and repayment worth three times the amount of the alleged overcharges.
With revenue of $247 billion in 2024, Cigna is the world’s fourth-leading health insurance payer, ranking behind UnitedHealthcare, Elevance and CVS. BMS reported revenue of $48 billion last year, with 7% of it generated by sales of Pomalyst.