The CMA has thrown a very large spanner into CVS’s acquisition of The Vet with adverse findings in five of the eight areas where The Vet has practices. CVS will likely have to sell all five practices unless it opts for a more detailed second phase investigation by the CMA and gets a better outcome….

Andrew Taylor and Nick Warren have contributed the foreword to e-Competitions’ latest special issue on healthcare. The article reviews a wide range of antitrust and merger cases in the European health sector in recent years, and identifies several common themes. These include the tension between the application of competition law to suppliers of healthcare services…

Andrew Taylor and Nick Warren have featured in the December edition of the Competition Policy International (CPI) Antitrust Chronicle. In their article, the authors review CMA’s interventions in mergers of UK grocery retailers and conclude that despite recent revisions to its approach of weighting competition in local markets any large-scale consolidation in UK grocery retailing seems…

Last month NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHS E/I) published plans for a new approach to assessing NHS transactions that put more emphasis on ensuring local populations benefit from NHS mergers. Until recently, NHS transactions were overseen by NHS Improvement for organisational impacts (e.g. finance, organisational risk), and the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) for competition….

Combination therapies use two or more drugs as part of a single treatment regime for an increasing number of diseases, such as cancer. Combination treatments can deliver better outcomes for patients by targeting a disease via multiple pathways or at multiple levels. Unfortunately, there are a number of barriers to making combination therapies more widely…