The phar­ma in­dus­try has been fight­ing for years to try to rein in a fed­er­al drug dis­count pro­gram that it says has grown rife with abuse.

Now, more of those cas­es are reach­ing the high­er courts. At least three ap­pel­late courts are mulling key chal­lenges that pit drug­mak­ers and states against each oth­er over the lim­its of the pro­gram, with bil­lions of dol­lars at stake.

On Tues­day, the Fourth Cir­cuit heard ar­gu­ments over whether to stop Mary­land and West Vir­ginia from en­forc­ing 340B laws, for now, that pro­hib­it drug­mak­er re­stric­tions on con­tract phar­ma­cies. The Fifth Cir­cuit last week heard ar­gu­ments over a sim­i­lar law in Louisiana, and could de­cide any day on whether to pre­lim­i­nar­i­ly en­join a Mis­sis­sip­pi law. The Eighth Cir­cuit, which up­held an Arkansas 340B law last year, is now con­sid­er­ing a bid against a law in Mis­souri.

Mer­ck has de­cid­ed to ter­mi­nate plans for a $1.3 bil­lion lab in Lon­don, cit­ing the UK gov­ern­ment’s lack of “mean­ing­ful progress” in life sci­ence in­vest­ments.

The com­pa­ny will more broad­ly “dis­con­tin­ue dis­cov­ery re­search op­er­a­tions” in the UK, it said in a state­ment to End­points News on Wednes­day. It al­so said it would va­cate ex­ist­ing labs at the Lon­don Bio­Science In­no­va­tion Cen­tre and the Fran­cis Crick In­sti­tute by the end of the year, and that 125 peo­ple will be laid off as a re­sult. Mer­ck said the “over­all un­der­val­u­a­tion of in­no­v­a­tive med­i­cines and vac­cines by suc­ces­sive UK Gov­ern­ments” con­tributed to the move.

The R&D fa­cil­i­ty had been in the works for years and had faced mul­ti­year de­lays. News of the scrapped plans was first re­port­ed Wednes­day by the Fi­nan­cial Times.

In­di­an drug­mak­er Bio­con says it’s prepar­ing to break in­to the gener­ic semaglu­tide mar­ket as it looks to file for reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval this month.

“Ozem­pic is com­ing off-patent next year. So there's a huge op­por­tu­ni­ty to play in the GLP-1 mar­ket,” Bio­con founder Ki­ran Mazum­dar-Shaw said in a Wednes­day in­ter­view with End­points News. 

Bio­con is eye­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty to po­ten­tial­ly be­come the first drug­mak­er to launch a cheap­er ver­sion of semaglu­tide, the start­ing ma­te­r­i­al for No­vo Nordisk's block­buster weight loss drugs Ozem­pic and We­govy.

The drug­mak­er is fil­ing its gener­ic semaglu­tide ap­pli­ca­tion “where mar­ket for­ma­tion is ex­pect­ed in 2026 and be­yond,” a Bio­con spokesper­son said, not­ing that it ex­pects ap­proval next year. Mean­while, com­peti­tor San­doz has al­ready filed an ap­pli­ca­tion for gener­ic semaglu­tide in Cana­da and ex­pects ap­proval in the first quar­ter of 2026.