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A DRUG company in the United States has won an out-of-court battle over Hong Kong sales of its new anti-cancer drug.

  The drug Taxol, derived from Pacific yew trees, is used as a last-ditch measure to fight ovarian and breast cancer.

  Multi-national pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) began selling Taxol to Hong Kong hospitals this year, under a government system which allowed unapproved drugs to be imported for specified patients.

  Doctors can apply to buy limited supplies of overseas-approved drugs while Hong Kong's Pharmacy and Poisons board decides if the product can go on wider sale.

  BMS has sold about 650 vials of Taxol to Hong Kong hospitals since March.

  But a subsidiary of another health care giant, F. H. Faulding and Company, has been importing a similar drug from Australia through its Hong Kong agents, Vantone Medical Supplies and Vantone Trading Corporation.

  The tangle arose when BMS realised its competitors were using the same brand name for the innovative new cancer treatment.

  The US giant issued a writ demanding Vantone Medical Supplies Company and its director and shareholder To Wung Ying, trading as Vantone Trading Corporation, ''stop importing, offering for sale, advertising, promoting, selling, supplying or disposing of any anti-cancer drug bearing the mark ''TAXOL'' or any substantially similar mark''.

  BMS's Hong Kong lawyers said the defendants, both of Fotan, had agreed to the order, with no financial consequences.



Company agrees to stop drug sale