Less than a week after a judge blocked Actavis plc from forcing patients to switch to new version of its Alzheimer’s drug Namenda, the company has brought on new legal firepower from Arnold & Porter and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
A&P’s Lisa Blatt and Wachtell’s George Conway III made their first appearance in the case on Tuesday, joining Actavis’ counsel at White & Case. The company notified U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in Manhattan that it’s appealing his Dec. 11 decision enjoining the company from halting sales of its older twice-daily version of Namenda—a move that the judge ruled was designed to thwart generic competition. In a follow-up order on Monday, Sweet ordered Actavis and its Forest Laboratories unit to continue selling twice-daily Namenda until a patent on the drug expires and generics can enter the market in the summer of 2015.
