Home Health Care Report: Purdue Pharma exploring Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing

Report: Purdue Pharma exploring Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing

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The maker of an painkiller blamed for feeding the opioid crisis in the US may file for bankruptcy, according to news reports.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, Reuters reported Monday that Stamford, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma was exploring a Chapter 11 filing amid financial liabilities from about 2,000 lawsuits against the company for allegedly contributing to the crisis. Purdue is the maker of OxyContin, a long-acting formulation of the opioid painkiller oxycodone.

The news service noted that shares of two other companies that manufacture opioids, Endo International and Insys Therapeutics, closed Monday down 17 percent and 2 percent, respectively.

According to the sources who spoke with Reuters, the Chapter 11 filing would stop the lawsuits and allow the drugmaker to negotiate legal claims with plaintiffs, while a bankruptcy judge would supervise.

Opioid painkillers – and drugmakers’ alleged efforts to maximize prescribing of them – are blamed for a dramatic rise in people becoming addicted and dying from drug overdoses. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, overdose deaths in the US related to prescription opioids rose from 3,442 in 1999 – four years after the Food and Drug Administration accused OxyContin – to 17,029 in 2017. Drugs involved in the deaths included a variety of prescription opioids, including methadone and fentanyl.

OxyContin’s sales in 2017 were $1.74 billion, down from $2.6 billion in 2012, according to sales research data reported by Reuters last year.

According to a 2017 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the overall rate of opioid prescribing peaked and leveled off from 2010 to 2012 and has been on the decline since 2012. However, in terms of morphine milligram equivalents – or MME, a measure used to represent the relative potency of opioids – the amount prescribed per person is about three times higher than it was in 1999. Still, according to the CDC, the decline in opioid prescribing and high-dose prescribing rates since 2008 that providers have grown more cautious about prescribing the drugs.

In addition to Purdue, other opioid makers have been the subject of lawsuits as well. In January, former executives of Insys – including founder John Kapoor – began a criminal trial in a Boston federal court. The executives were arrested in 2016 and 2017 and charged with allegedly conspiring with doctors in various states, many of them pain physicians, to prescribe the drug Subsys in exchange for bribes and kickbacks. The drug is a sublingual spray with FDA approval to treat breakthrough cancer pain, but most of the prescriptions in question were for patients who did not have cancers. During the period of the alleged conspiracy, sales of Subsys went from $3.7 million during the first nine months of 2012 to $329.5 million in fiscal year 2015.

Photo: Darren McCollester, Getty Images

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