Policy Concentrates LITIGATION
U.S. Supreme Court gives pharma a win Out-of-state residents cannot sue BristolMyers Squibb in California The U.S. Supreme Court has handed a victory to the pharmaceutical industry and other businesses that want to prevent plaintiffs from shopping for friendly courts to hear product liability cases. In an 8-1 ruling, the justices on June 19 overturned a California Supreme Court decision that had allowed a nationwide lawsuit against Bristol-Myers Squibb to proceed in a state court. Nearly 600 out-of-state residents had joined 86 Californians in claiming the New York-based manufacturer had misrepresented the risks of taking its blood-thinning drug Plavix. California is widely viewed as a plaintiff-friendly state. But Bristol-Myers Squibb “did not develop Plavix in California, did not create a marketing strategy for Plavix in California,
and did not manufacture, label, package, or work on the regulatory approval of the product in California,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “The nonresidents’ claims involve no harm in California and no harm to California residents,” Alito wrote. The state high court erred, he explained, by allowing the suit without identifying an adequate link between California and the nonresidents’ claims. “What is needed—and what is missing here—is a connection between the forum and the specific claims at issue,” the opinion states. “This is one of the most important mass tort-product liability decisions ever,” says James Beck, who focuses on pharmaceutical and product liability law at Reed Smith.
The blood-thinning drug Plavix was the focus of the lawsuit. The ruling will limit the notion “that large companies can be sued by anyone, anywhere,” he says. However, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed concern that the ruling could make it more difficult for injured patients to successfully sue corporations for product liability in any state. “The effect of today’s opinion will be to curtail—and in some cases eliminate— plaintiffs’ ability to hold corporations fully accountable for their nationwide conduct,” she wrote in a dissenting opinion. The decision “hands one more tool to corporate defendants determined to prevent the aggregation of individual claims and forces injured plaintiffs to bear the burden of bringing suit in what will often be far flung jurisdictions,” Sotomayor wrote.—
GLENN HESS, special to C&EN
India’s government labs face fiscal crisis Facilities directed to commercialize technologies to fund work India’s largest and premier R&D organization, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), which has 38 national laboratories, is in dire financial straits. CSIR’s Director General Girish Sahni says the labs and new research projects will be left with $31.3 million out of the nearly $630 million the government allocated for fiscal 2017, which runs through March 2018. The financial crunch stems from implementation of recommendations by India’s Seventh Central Pay Commission for higher pay, perks, pensions, and other benefits for government employees and retirees. The remaining $31.3 million is not enough to cover CSIR’s costs for new research, instruments, supplies, utilities, travel, and maintenance. The labs will have to address the financial shortfall by commercializing technologies rapidly. In a June 1 letter to directors of the CSIR
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laboratories, Sahni asked the labs to report on the status of technologies they are developing and to identify ones that can be licensed immediately. Sahni asked each laboratory to report on “at least one outstanding game-changer technology” that can provide revenue in the short run. “This is a very important activity
Researchers at India’s National Chemical Laboratory are among those affected by the fiscal crunch.
and should not be neglected at any cost,” he says in the letter. In a March 1 letter to the lab directors, Sahni warns, “The currently available financial resources are limited, and therefore we need to effectively supplement these resources by generating a substantial external cash flow. Thus, a relatively limited number of projects will be supported with internal CSIR resources.” Ashwini Kumar Nangia, director of CSIR’s National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, tells C&EN that this year’s financial impact will be heavy due to the dual impact of enhanced salaries, which are part of the pay commission recommendations, and arrears for the past two years. However, Nangia is optimistic that the fiscal crisis will blow over. Two years ago, the Indian government directed CSIR, which employs nearly 8,500 scientists and technical staff in India, to finance half of its budget from external sources by commercializing its technologies.—K.V. VENKATASUBRAMANIAN,
special to C&EN
CREDIT: GANNET77/ISTOCK.COM (PLAVIX); CSIR-NATIONAL CHEMICAL LABORATORY ARCHIVE (LAB)
RESEARCH FUNDING
