Actos users who were harmed by the
drug suffered a major setback after Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., persuaded a
judge to throw out a $6.5 million jury verdict against it. The
mega-corporation’s lawyers argued that the Plaintiff did not produce sufficient
evidence to show his cancer was caused by the medication. The Los Angeles case
is Cooper v. Takeda Pharmaceuticals America Inc., CGC-12-518535, California
Superior Court (Los Angeles).
The trial lasted nearly two months
and the jury deliberated for almost five days.
Judge
Kenneth Freeman
ruled that the Plaintiff’s, Jack Cooper, attorneys were not able to properly
link his bladder cancer to his Actos use and jurors should not have had a
chance to return their verdict against Asia’s largest drugmaker. It was the first of more than 3,000
lawsuits over the medication to go to trial.
The
Plaintiff in this case took the drug for more than four years before being
diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2011. Takeda’s lawyers argued during the
almost two-month trial that Cooper was more likely to develop bladder cancer
because he was an elderly male former smoker who suffered from diabetes. That
placed him in high-risk categories for the disease regardless of his Actos use,
the company’s attorneys argued to jurors.
However,
Judge Freeman’s ruling hinged on an expert doctor who concluded Cooper’s Actos
use caused his bladder cancer turned out to be “inherently unreliable” and that
justified throwing the case out. Freeman issued a 27-page ruling.
It
is believed that Cooper’s lawyers will appeal Freeman’s post-verdict ruling
throwing out the case.
It
is estimated that Actos sales
peaked in the year ended March 2011 at $4.5 billion, or 27 percent of Takeda’s
revenue at the time.
More
than 1,200 suits have been consolidated into an MDL in the U.S. District Court
for the Western District of Louisiana. The first federal case is set for trial
in January and Mark
Lanier, who won a $253 million verdict
against Merck in 2005 in the first trial over the company’s withdrawn Vioxx
painkiller, is slated to try the case for plaintiff Ida St. John.
Former
Actos users contend in court filings Takeda researchers ignored or downplayed
concerns about the drug’s cancer-causing potential before it went on sale in
the U.S. in 1999, and misled U.S. regulators about the medicine’s risks.
