Abbott pleads guilty to misbranding in $1.5 billion settlement

by Ben Vernia | May 8th, 2012

On May 7, the Department of Justice announced that Abbott Laboratories, Inc., will pay $1.5 billion to settle civil and criminal allegations involving its anti-seizure drug Depakote. According to DOJ’s press release:

Global Health Care Company Abbott Laboratories Inc. has pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve its criminal and civil liability arising from the company’s unlawful promotion of the prescription drug Depakote for uses not approved as safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Justice Department announced today. The resolution – the second largest payment by a drug company – includes a criminal fine and forfeiture totaling $700 million and civil settlements with the federal government and the states totaling $800 million. Abbott also will be subject to court-supervised probation and reporting obligations for Abbott’s CEO and Board of Directors.

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The FDA is responsible for approving drugs as safe and effective for specified uses. Under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), a company in its application to the FDA must specify each intended use of a drug. A company’s promotional activities must be limited to only the intended uses that FDA approved. In fact, promotion by the manufacturer for other uses – known as “off-label” uses – renders the product misbranded.

Abbott has pleaded guilty to misbranding Depakote by promoting the drug to control agitation and aggression in elderly dementia patients and to treat schizophrenia when neither of these uses was FDA approved. In an agreed statement of facts filed in the criminal action, Abbott admits that from 1998 through 2006, the company maintained a specialized sales force trained to market Depakote in nursing homes for the control of agitation and aggression in elderly dementia patients, despite the absence of credible scientific evidence that Depakote was safe and effective for that use. In addition, from 2001 through 2006, the company marketed Depakote in combination with atypical antipsychotic drugs to treat schizophrenia, even after its clinical trials failed to demonstrate that adding Depakote was any more effective than an atypical antipsychotic alone for that use.

Illegal Promotion of Depakote to Control Agitation and Aggression in Dementia Patients
The FDA approved Depakote for only three uses: epileptic seizures, bipolar mania and the prevention of migraines. The FDA never approved the drug as safe and effective for the off-label use of controlling behavioral disturbances in dementia patients. In 1999, Abbott was forced to discontinue a clinical trial of Depakote in the treatment of dementia due to an increased incidence of adverse events, including somnolence, dehydration and anorexia experienced by the elderly study participants administered Depakote.

Abbott trained its sales force to promote Depakote to health care providers and employees of nursing homes as advantageous over antipsychotic drugs for controlling agitation and aggression in elderly dementia patients because Depakote was not subject to certain provisions of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 (OBRA) and its implementing regulations designed to prevent the use of unnecessary medications in nursing homes. Exploiting the fact that certain OBRA provisions did not yet apply to Depakote, Abbott sales representatives stated that by using Depakote, nursing homes could avoid the administrative burdens and costs of complying with OBRA.

Abbott’s off-label promotion of Depakote was multifaceted. The company entered into contracts that provided long-term care pharmacy providers with payments of rebates based on increases in the use of Depakote in nursing homes serviced by the providers. In addition to using its sales force to promote the drug to health care providers and employees of nursing homes, Abbott created programs and materials to train the pharmacy providers’ consultant pharmacists about the off-label use of Depakote to encourage them to recommend the drug for this unapproved use. Under these contracts, Abbott paid millions of dollars in rebates to the pharmacy providers.

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Illegal Off-Label Promotion of Depakote for Schizophrenia
In the agreed statement of facts, Abbott also admitted that from 2001 through 2006, the Company misbranded Depakote by marketing the drug to treat schizophrenia. Abbott funded two studies of the use of Depakote to treat schizophrenia, and both failed to meet the main goals established for the study. When the second study failed to show a statistically significant treatment difference between antipsychotic drugs used in combination with Depakote and antipsychotic drugs alone, Abbott waited nearly two years to notify its own sales force about the study results and another two years to publish those results. During this time, Abbott continued to promote Depakote off-label to treat schizophrenia.

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Criminal Plea
Today’s global resolution has criminal, civil and administrative components. First, Abbott has pleaded guilty to a criminal misdemeanor for misbranding Depakote in violation of the FDCA. Under the plea agreement, Abbott will pay a criminal fine of $500 million, forfeit assets of $198.5 million, and submit to a term of probation for five years. In addition, Abbott will also pay $1.5 million to the Virginia Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. As a condition of probation, Abbott will report any probable FDCA violations to the probation office, its CEO will certify compliance with this reporting requirement, and its board will report annually on the effectiveness of the company’s compliance program. In addition, Abbott agrees that during the term of probation, the company will not compensate sales representatives for off-label sales, will ensure that continuing medical education grant-making decisions are not controlled by sales and marketing, will require that letters communicating medical information to healthcare providers be accurate and unbiased, and will have policies designed to ensure that clinical trials are approved by the company’s medical or scientific organizations and published in a consistent and transparent manner. Abbott’s guilty plea and sentence are not final until accepted by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia.

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Civil Settlement
Under the civil settlement, Abbott has agreed to pay $800 million to the federal government ($560,851,357) and the states ($239,148,643) that opt to participate in the agreement to resolve claims that its unlawful marketing and illegal remuneration practices caused false claims to be submitted to government health care programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE and to the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs.

The civil settlement addresses broader allegations by the United States that from 1998 through 2008, Abbott unlawfully promoted Depakote for unapproved uses, including behavioral disturbances in dementia patients, psychiatric conditions in children and adolescents, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, conduct disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol and drug withdrawal, attention deficit disorder and autism. . Some of these unapproved uses were not medically accepted indications for which the United States and state Medicaid programs provided coverage for Depakote. The United States contends that this promotion included, in part, making false and misleading statements about the safety, efficacy, dosing and cost-effectiveness of Depakote for some of these unapproved uses, and claiming use of Depakote to control behavioral disturbances in dementia patients would help nursing homes avoid the administrative burdens and costs of complying with OBRA regulatory restrictions applicable to antipsychotics.

The civil settlement also covers allegations that Abbott offered and paid illegal remuneration to health care professionals and long term care pharmacy providers to induce them to promote and/or prescribe Depakote and to improperly and unduly influence the content of company sponsored Continuing Medical Education programs, in violation of the Federal Anti-Kickback Statute. The claims settled by the civil agreement are allegations only and there has been no determination of liability, except to the extent that Abbott has admitted facts in the civil settlement agreement or in the criminal plea and agreed statement of facts filed in the criminal action.

The civil settlement resolves four lawsuits pending in federal court in the Western District of Virginia under the qui tam, or whistleblower, provisions of the False Claims Act, which allow private citizens to bring civil actions on behalf of the United States and share in any recovery. As part of today’s resolution, the whistleblowers will receive $84 million from the federal share of the settlement amount.

Corporate Integrity Agreement
In addition to the criminal and civil resolutions, Abbott has also executed a Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA) with the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG). The five-year CIA requires, among other things, that Abbott’s board of directors review the effectiveness of the company’s compliance program, that high-level executives certify to compliance, that Abbott maintain standardized risk assessment and mitigation processes, and that the company post on its website information about payments to doctors. Abbott is subject to exclusion from federal health care programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, for a material breach of the CIA and subject to monetary penalties for less significant breaches.

As the company’s press release notes, earlier this year it had announced that it would subdivide Abbott Laboratories into two new companies: one to be called Abbott (a “a diversified medical products company”), and that other (“a research-based pharmaceutical company”) to be named AbbVie. AbbVie will bear the compliance and certification obligations after the split.

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