A new Allergan drug raises eyebrows at Pharmacia, in the Healthcare column

Businesses Fret About Patient Rights; Beckman Extends Pact

Allergan Inc., the Irvine-based drug maker, had a busy March on the glaucoma treatment front. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration approved Allergan’s Alphagan P pharmaceutical for treatment of elevated interocular pressure in patients with open-angle glaucoma and ocular hypertension.

Alphagan P is a new formulation of the company’s original Alphagan ophthalmic solution that is expected to be available within the next six months. Two 12-month clinical studies have shown that Alphagan P is comparable to the original Alphagan, with lower rates of certain adverse effects.

Separately, Allergan also released a three-month comparison study of its Lumigan ophthalmic solution and Xalatan, a glaucoma medication produced by Peapack, N.J.-based drug behemoth Pharmacia Corp. at a symposium in Prague.

Lumigan received federal approval March 16; it is designed for patients who can’t tolerate or are not sufficiently responsive to other pressure-lowering glaucoma medications.

The new Lumigan-Xalatan comparison study covered 232 patients with elevated intraocular pressure due to either open-angle glaucoma or ocular hypertension. It indicated that both Lumigan and Xalatan, used once a day, were effective in lowering intraocular pressure over a 24-hour period for patients with glaucoma.

The study showed, however, that patients treated with Lumigan demonstrated lower mean intraocular pressure than the patients treated with Xalatan after three months of therapy.

Glaucoma, which leads to optic nerve damages and blindness, affects around 3 million Americans. The condition is currently incurable, but opinions from the Advanced Glaucoma Intervention Study have suggested that getting lower intraocular pressure levels can slow glaucoma’s progress.

Meanwhile, Lumigan’s pending introduction appears to have hit a nerve at Pharmacia, which counted a market capitalization of $61 billion last week, as opposed to Allergan’s $9 billion. Specifically, Pharmacia charges that Allergan violated patents covering Xalatan, according to published reports.

Allergan filed a federal lawsuit on March 1 seeking a clarification ruling that Lumigan wouldn’t infringe on certain patents owned or licensed by Pharmacia. But Pharmacia has said that it believes Lumigan’s chemical structure violates at least two Pharmacia patents.

Liability Concerns

Business owners have found that they must offer healthcare and other benefits in order to lure workers. But it’s not all calm out there, according to a new report from Hewitt Associates, a suburban Chicago management and employee benefits consulting firm with a Newport Beach office.

Hewitt reported that employers are concerned about patients’ rights legislation, particularly if any bill that comes out of Congress may subject them to expanded liability. Specifically, 46% of more than 600 employers polled by the firm said they would likely cease providing healthcare coverage if they are subject to liability,a 10% increase over last year.

Hewitt found that its respondents seemed to be interested in health delivery models that place more emphasis on the consumer. For instance, 54% of organizations polled supported legislation that would change the tax code to allow individual credits for purchasing health insurance. That number was 14% higher than last year, according to Hewitt.

There was also a mention of a “defined contribution” approach to providing healthcare benefits within the Hewitt study. Defined contribution, according to Hewitt, is a situation in which companies provide employees with a certain amount of money to select and buy their own healthcare coverage.

Hewitt found that 22% of its respondents are considering defined contribution choices, but more than half were considering options like self-directed plan designs and multi-tier health networks. Employers cited controlling program costs as their top reason for moving to a defined contribution model, followed by giving healthcare decision control to employees, limiting legal liability and transferring health management activities to a third party, Hewitt said.

Locally, CaliforniaChoice, an offshoot of Orange-based Word