Ranbaxy To Demand Web Site Stop Selling Select Drugs

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New York, April 14: Drug maker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd on Tuesday said it would demand an Internet site stop selling its generic drugs that have not been approved for sale in the United States.

The operator of the site, look4generics.com, already is the target of a lawsuit by Pfizer Inc asking the courts to halt its sale of a cheaper generic version of its cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor, the world’s top-selling prescription medicine.

The generic, Storvas, is made by Ranbaxy and sold legally in India, Ranbaxy said. But Lipitor, which last year became the first prescription drug with annual sales above $10 billion, is still under patent protection in the United States and has no approved generic version in this country.

Ranbaxy said it does not recognize or endorse the Internet pharmacy look4generics (http://www.look4generics.com). “We have no connection with this look4generics,” Jay Deshmukh, vice-president intellectual property worldwide for Ranbaxy, told Reuters in a telephone interview. “They are not authorised to use our trade name, Storvas, that they are using and we are going to write a very strong letter to them to cease and desist from using our name and that trademark,” added Mr Deshmukh, who handles Ranbaxy’s global litigation. “We are not going to sell this product until we have final approval to sell the product in the US,” he said.

Look4generics is also selling a Ranbaxy version of Pfizer’s top-selling impotence treatment Viagra and a copycat version of Pfizer pain medicine Celebrex made by another company. A statement on the Web site says: “We get our products from the most reputable and renowned companies in the Asian pharmaceutical industry” and cites Ranbaxy and another Indian drug maker, Dr Reddy’s Labs, among others.