Nearly a year after a jury decided that Johnson & Johnson should be fined just over $150 million in a lawsuit alleging that the company engaged in misleading marketing tactics for two of its HIV meds, a judge has upped the penalty more than tenfold.
In an opinion filed Friday, U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi of New Jersey followed up on the June jury decision that found J&J’s Janssen, now known as J&J Innovative Medicine, guilty of violating both state and federal versions of the False Claims Act.
As detailed in the initial 2017 complaint, J&J was accused in part of promoting Prezista as “lipid-neutral” between 2006 and 2014, despite the “significant negative effect” on lipids detailed in the drug’s FDA-approved label. The plaintiffs also alleged that the Big Pharma had claimed its Intelence was safe and effective for once-daily dosing and in treatment-naive patients, even though the drug was formally approved only as a twice-daily therapy for treatment-experienced patients.
The jury last summer ultimately found Janssen liable for submitting 159,574 claims violating the False Claims Act, calculating damages of $120 million to the federal government and $30 million to the group of states that had joined the lawsuit.
J&J to seek appeal of $150M verdict in long-spanning HIV meds off-label marketing case
In last week’s decision, Quraishi sided with J&J’s post-trial filing claiming that the plaintiffs hadn’t sufficiently established the...
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