Life Sciences Enforcement Testing the Boundaries of Competition Law
Life sciences is a high-stakes sector where antitrust enforcement is testing the boundaries of competition law. The focus differs sharply across jurisdictions. Competition law is being used – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly – as a lever to advance national healthcare priorities: lowering prices, controlling budgets, accelerating access, or safeguarding domestic innovation. Companies operating globally must navigate not one coherent approach to dominance, but several parallel theories that reflect political agendas as much as competition doctrine. Here, we examine how those theories are playing out across the US, EU, UK, and Asia-Pacific.
United States
In the US, the Trump Administration has made lowering prescription drug prices a headline policy objective. Its “most-favored-nation” executive order directs federal agencies – including the FTC and DOJ – to push drug prices toward levels seen in other developed economies. The Administration has coupled this mandate with direct negotiations to reduce prices for specific drugs and has stated its intention to “deploy every tool in [its] arsenal” against what it considers abusive pricing.
In practice, this approach reinforces an aggressive enforcement posture. Recent FTC cases targeting pricing conduct and exclusionary rebate schemes (e.g., rebates conditioned on limiting access to lower-cost generics or biosimilars) as well as agency listening sessions on formulary steering demonstrate how antitrust is being integrated into a broader affordability agenda. Beyond this, the FTC also 10 Key Themes report.
