Indivior’s legal fight over addiction product

DRUG maker Indivior has gone to court to try to defend the US patent for its best-seller opioid addiction treatment, Suboxone, after a ruling earlier this month that paved the way for rival products wiped £1bn from its market capitalisation.

The FTSE 250 firm has filed lawsuits against competitors Dr Reddy’s, Actavis, Par Pharmaceutical Industries, Alvogen, Teva Pharmaceutical and Mylan, which are all planning to produce copycat versions of Suboxone.

Suboxone is a dissolvable film placed under the tongue that tricks the brain into thinking it is still receiving an opioid.

It is used to treat addiction to both illegal opioids such as heroin and prescription opioid-based painkillers. Suboxone had been forecast to grow strongly amid America’s opioid addiction crisis, which has been declared a national emergency by President Donald Trump. The number of drug overdose deaths involving opioids in the US quadrupled between 1999 and 2014.

The drug treatment currently accounts for 80pc of Indivior’s total annual revenues of $1bn (£770m). Shaun Thaxter, chief executive of Indivior, said: “We strongly believe that these companies with their proposed generic products infringe on our intellectual property and we are taking the appropriate actions to enforce our position.”

After a US court ruled at the start of September that Indian rival Dr Reddy’s generic version did not infringe its patent, Indivior warned it could lead to a “rapid and material loss of market share … within a matter of months”.

Shares in Indivior, which was spun out of Reckitt Benckiser three years ago, plunged by more than a third to 267.6p on that day, their largest fall since it became an independent company. They closed up 1.6pc at 300.1p yesterday.