A federal judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has denied class certification to wholesalers of the narcolepsy drug Provigil who claimed that its maker, Cephalon, paid off Ranbaxy Laboratories to delay generic versions of the medication from entering the market.

U.S. District Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania's ruling comes nearly a year after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit revoked class status in the case and sent it back to Goldberg for a second look.

The appeals court did not entirely scrap the idea of a potential class of direct purchasers of the wakefulness drug—rather, it noted that the small number of plaintiffs merited re-examination under a new framework to determine whether numerosity was satisfied by the two dozen plaintiffs.