More Than 100 Suits Filed over Pradaxa Warnings
More than 100 lawsuits have been filed in federal courts over alleged bleeding risks from the blood thinner Pradaxa.
The medication has been on the market for two years, generating $1 billion in sales, the New York Times reports. The drug has been linked to more than 500 deaths in the United States.
At a hearing in October, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs revealed that 131 Pradaxa cases have been filed so far, including 120 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, the Madison-St. Clair Record reported last month.
Lawyers say thousands more lawsuits are expected. The suits claim a failure to warn of risks and the lack of an antidote to counter the medication’s effects, the Madison St.-Clair Record says. U.S. District Chief Judge David Herndon of the Southern District of Illinois has scheduled four bellwether trials for the multidistrict litigation beginning in August 2014.
Drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim says patients in a large clinical trial of the drug died at about the same rate as people taking warfarin. Further bolstering the company’s case is a report released Friday by the Food and Drug Administration finding that Pradaxa did not create a higher risk of bleeding than warfarin.
