By Diana Novak Jones

Sept 12 (Reuters) - A federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected a former Gilead Sciences sales representative’s claims that the company paid kickbacks to doctors and patients to boost prescriptions of its hepatitis C drugs Sovaldi and Harvoni.

In a ruling on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe in Philadelphia sided with Gilead in the whistleblower lawsuit brought by its former employee Toby Travis, finding that Travis hadn’t proven his claims that Gilead used speaker programs and charitable donations to hide payments to doctors and patients meant to induce them to write and fill prescriptions for the drugs.

She also rejected his argument that Gilead’s April agreement to pay $202 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit accusing it of paying kickbacks to doctors who agreed to prescribe its HIV drugs could bolster his claims, saying Gilead’s admissions in that case didn’t apply to its actions with Sovaldi and Harvoni.

James Miller, an attorney for Travis, said they plan to appeal the ruling and expect it to be reversed.

A spokesperson for Gilead said the company’s speaker programs serve to educate healthcare professionals about the medicines, and the donations to charitable foundations help patients access treatments they need.

Travis, who was a sales representative for Gilead’s hepatitis C drugs between 2013 and 2014, filed his whistleblower lawsuit in 2017. He accused the company of violating the anti-kickback statute and the False Claims Act, saying that prescriptions submitted to Medicare for reimbursement as a result of the kickbacks constituted fraud.

He claimed the company was using a sham speaker program, which hired healthcare providers to give presentations about its drugs, as a way to push doctors to write more prescriptions for its hepatitis C drugs and reward high prescribers. He also accused Gilead of using donations to a program meant to help low-income patients afford co-payments for drugs to induce those patients to use Harvoni and Sovaldi specifically.

In 2019, the U.S. declined to intervene in the action.

Gilead urged Rufe to throw out Travis’ claims, claiming he had no evidence to support them. The company also asked Rufe to sanction Travis, accusing him of knowingly trying to defraud the court by pursuing baseless claims.

In her ruling on Thursday, Rufe declined to sanction Travis but agreed that despite years of discovery, his evidence was “flimsy.” There was no evidence that Gilead was hiring specific doctors based on their prescription numbers, she said, and the donations Gilead made to the charitable foundation were far larger than what the foundation spent on the company’s hepatitis C drugs.

The case is United States v. Gilead Sciences Inc, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, No. 2:17-cv-01183.

For Travis: James Shah, Natalie Finkelman, Bruce Parke, Alec Berin, James Miller and Nathan Zipperian of Miller Shah; David Caputo and John Crutchlow of Youman & Caputo; and John Gross of the Weiser Law Firm

For Gilead: Molly Flynn of Barnes & Thornburg; Devora Allon, Jay Lefkowitz, Kevin Neylan and Kevin Jonke of Kirkland & Ellis; and Will Sears of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan

(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones in Chicago)