FTC Asks Supreme Court to Leave AndroGel Antitrust Ruling Intact

The Federal Trade Commission urged the U.S. Supreme Court not to get involved in its antitrust lawsuit over an alleged scheme by AbbVie Inc. to impede generic competition for its testosterone booster AndroGel by battering rivals with “sham” patent infringement claims.

The agency fired back Wednesday at AbbVie’s petition to the high court, which challenged a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirming its liability for seeking to extract anti-competitive settlements from competitors by bottlenecking them behind automatic regulatory delays.

The company has argued that the appeals court conflated two separate legal questions—whether AbbVie’s ...