Washington DC Defective Drug Litigation Blog

The idea that the truth will ultimately set individuals free has provided comfort to those suffering trials and tribulations for thousands of years. However, the truth often takes time to surface. In cases involving dangerous or defective drugs, many years must often pass before victims are granted relief. It seems that even though evidence strongly supports victims who have filed suit due to injuries caused by Fosamax that the truth about this drug has yet to gain victory in court.

The first Fosamax trial concluded last month in New Jersey. The jury serving on this particular federal case found in favor of Fosamax manufacturer Merck. This one setback does not mean that other Fosamax victims will not be given their say or awarded just compensation. But it does mean that the truth about this dangerous drug may not be fully understood and vindicated until a later date.

A tension exists in the nature of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval processes for pharmaceuticals. On the one hand, no one desires that unduly dangerous or potentially defective drugs be placed on the market. On the other hand, patients who have no access to any viable drugs for their conditions are often willing and eager to chance that a developing therapy will meet their needs. The longer the FDA's approval process takes, the more that the agency can ensure a given drug's safety. However, the longer the approval process takes, the longer that patients with unmet needs continue to suffer without access to a potentially helpful medication.

The FDA has attempted to bridge this gap before, by allowing certain drugs access to an expedited approval process if they meet certain criteria and may potentially help critically ill or injured patients. The FDA is now considering a new approval process that would further benefit these populations. Specifically, the agency is asking for input on the possibility of allowing for expedited approval of drugs aimed at unmet patient needs that have been studied in well-defined patient subpopulations suffering from serious manifestations of a targeted condition.

On Monday, January 7, 2013, at 9:00 a.m., the attorneys of Aaron Levine & Associates will advocate on behalf of DES daughters in the first historical diethylstilbestrol (DES) breast cancer trial in Boston federal court. The case, Fecho v. Eli Lilly, seeks to hold pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company responsible for negligently marketing DES, a mega-dose synthetic estrogen, as safe for use in pregnant women. Eli Lilly ignored studies published as early as the 1930s that reported the carcinogenic and teratogenic risks of DES, and rushed to market the drug as a miscarriage preventative without controlled testing. Because of their prenatal exposure to the drug, DES daughters are at a 105% increased risk of developing breast cancer beginning at age 40. By age 50, the risk of DES breast cancer increases to 285%.

Yet another study has linked a common class of diabetes drugs to an increased risk of bladder cancer. According to a study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania - which was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute - those patients taking thiazolidinedione (TZD) drugs long-term are two to three times more likely to acquire bladder cancer than those who are taking another common type of diabetes drug known as sulfonylurea.

Specifically, the study discovered that patients taking two different TZDs - one of which was the diabetes drug Actos - for more than five years have a two-to-three-fold increase in their chances of acquiring bladder cancer when measured against those taking sulfonylureas.

Unfortunately, TZDs are quite common as they account for almost 20 percent of all drugs prescribed to treat diabetes in the United States. Actos alone is prescribed roughly 15 million times each year, making it the ninth most common drug prescribed in the United States.