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Jury awards $2M to former Actos user with cancer

Jury awards $2M to former Actos user with cancer

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Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. was ordered by a jury to pay more than $2 million to a woman who claimed the company’s Actos diabetes medicine caused her bladder cancer, in the latest of thousands of lawsuits involving the drug to go to trial.

Jurors in state court in Philadelphia deliberated more than five hours Friday before finding that officials of Osaka, Japan-based Takeda failed to properly warn Frances Wisniewski’s doctors about Actos’s cancer risks.

Wisniewski, 79, a retired accountant, is the seventh Actos patient to take her suit to trial. Her case follows a $9 billion verdict this year in Louisiana against Takeda and Eli Lilly & Co. for hiding the diabetes medicine’s risks. The companies have asked a judge to grant them a new trial in that case.

Takeda, Asia’s largest drugmaker, scrapped development of another diabetes drug this year when research linked it to liver damage.

More than 3,500 Actos suits have been consolidated before U.S. District Judge Rebecca Doherty in Lafayette, Louisiana, for pretrial information exchanges, according to court dockets. The company faces another 4,500 cases in state courts in Illinois, West Virginia, California and Pennsylvania, according to court records.

In Wisniewski’s case, Takeda argued that smoking rather than Actos was the most likely cause of the Norristown, Pennsylvania, resident’s cancer. She “had many risk factors” for cancer other than the medicine, Craig Thompson, one of the drugmaker’s lawyers, told jurors in his closing arguments yesterday.

The Pennsylvania case is Wisniewski v. Takeda Pharmaceuticals America Inc., 120702272, Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. The consolidated Actos case in Louisiana is In Re Actos (Pioglitazone) Products Liability Litigation, 11-md-02299, U.S. District Court, W.D. Louisiana (Lafayette).

Former Actos users contend in court filings that Takeda researchers ignored or downplayed concerns about the drug’s cancer-causing potential before it went on sale in the U.S. and misled U.S. regulators about the medicine’s risks.

In 2013, juries in California and Maryland ordered Takeda to pay a combined $8.2 million in damages over the company’s handling of the drug. But those verdicts later were thrown out by judges. The company also has won defense verdicts in two cases in state court in Las Vegas and one in state court in Illinois.

Takeda faces its next Actos trial in state court in West Virginia starting Oct. 15, according to court filings.

Sales of Actos peaked in the year ended March 2011 at $4.5 billion for Takeda and accounted for 27 percent of the company’s revenue at the time, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Actos has generated more than $16 billion in sales since its 1999 release, according to court filings. Takeda now faces generic competition from Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd.

With assistance from Michael Bathon in Wilmington.

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