Congress doesn't help Amgen

WASHINGTON - The omnibus spending bill signed by President Clinton last week was packed with provisions favoring special interests, but despite extensive lobbying efforts, Amgen Inc. and Schering-Plough Corp. were not among the beneficiaries.

AMGN had been trying to amend the Hatch-Waxman Act in an effort to counter court decisions that grant Transkaryotic Therapies Inc. an exemption from patent infringement litigation while it is conducting clinical trials of its GA-EPO product, which could compete with AMGN's Epogen erythropoietin. But large pharmaceutical companies helped to scuttle the effort...