Now EU claims excessive pricing

ASPEN Pharmacare Holdings was being probed by EU antitrust regulators who said it might have charged too much for cancer drugs. It was the first time the EU targeted drugmakers for excessive pricing, following an Italian antitrust fine for Aspen last year. “When the price of a drug suddenly goes up by several hundred percent, this is something the commission may look at,” EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said yesterday. The EU said it was probing Aspen’s pricing practices for medicines using the active pharmaceutical ingredients chlorambucil, melphalan, mercaptopurine, tioguanine and busulfan. They are used to treat cancer and sold in different formulations and under multiple brand names. Aspen acquired them after initial patents expired. Regulators said they would check that Aspen conducted “so-called price-gouging” by imposing price increases of up to several hundred percent. The EU said it was told Aspen threatened to withdraw medicines in some countries and “has actually done so in certain cases.” The probe covers all of the European economic area except Italy, where regulators fined the company €5 million (R72.8m) last year for raising prices on cancer drugs by as much as 1 500 percent starting in 2014. That related to an anti-tumor drug package Aspen bought from GlaxoSmithKline, a former shareholder. – Bloomberg