Actos Lawsuit Angles: How Many Can You Come Up With?

May 14th, 2012. By AbiK

If you’ve tried to figure out what’s going on with Actos—and more specifically, Actos lawsuits–you’ve probably found it can get a bit confusing. This drug has more lawsuit angles now than a tetrahedron. So here’s a list of Actos lawsuit angles:

Actos Bladder Cancer Lawsuits

Actos bladder cancer lawsuits are not class action lawsuits. These are lawsuits filed by individuals who allege they now have bladder cancer because of taking Actos to treat their type 2 diabetes.

When there are many individual lawsuits claiming similar injury (i.e., Actos bladder cancer) brought on by the same defendant(s), it’s a mass tort not a class action. The reason for that is because even though all the victims have bladder cancer, each individual case will be different—for example, the extent of harm will be different from one victim to another, and any damages paid needs to reflect that. In a class action lawsuit, everyone in the class receives the same exact damages.

Typically, parts of a mass tort that are in common across all injured parties will be consolidated into what’s called ‘multi-district litigation’ (MDL). Once the common aspects of all the lawsuits have been resolved, any individual lawsuit differences can be addressed.

Actos Class Action Lawsuit

While there is not an Actos class action lawsuit for bladder cancer injury itself, there has been an Actos class action filed that alleges Takeda, the manufacturer of Actos, engaged in wrongful conduct when it designed, manufactured and marketed the drug–because the drug wound up being linked to bladder cancer and getting an FDA warning because of it.

Actos Whistleblower Lawsuit

Moving right along, a former consultant for Takeda, Dr. Helen Ge, came forward in a whistleblower lawsuit stating that Takeda knew about and yet either did not report or underreported cases of both Actos bladder cancer and Actos myocardial infarction (i.e., Actos heart attack).

According the lawsuit, Ge asserted that “Takeda instructed its medical reviewers not to report hundreds of non-hospitalized or non-fatal congestive heart failure cases as ‘serious adverse events and thus avoided its responsibility of accurately analyzing and reporting these hundreds of serious adverse events to the FDA.

Actos Heart Attack Lawsuit

Like the song “One Thing Leads to Another”, the Actos whistleblower lawsuit sheds light on another potential Actos lawsuit angle: myocardial infarction. Initally, in 2007, the FDA placed a warning on Actos (and Avandia) for congenital heart failure. That warning, however, did not include mention of mycardial infarction (i.e., heart attack). Yet, there had been complaints of Actos heart attack, and those complaints more or less hung in limbo. With Dr. Ge stepping forward, however, it would appear that her allegations could spell more lawsuits for Takeda—this time from Actos heart attack victims. If, in fact, Takeda knew that there was an increased risk for myocardial infarction given their own adverse event reports but did not report that risk, the potential for additional Actos lawsuits is there.

And that could perhaps mean a whole other Actos lawsuit…in the form of an Actos class action. After all, remember how Takeda aggressively advertised that it was a “safer” alternative to Avandia once Avandia took the hit for heart side effects? Stay tuned.

Tags: Actos, Actos Bladder Cancer, Actos class action lawsuit, Actos heart attack, Actos Lawsuit, Dr. Ge, Takeda, type 2 diabetes, Whistleblower

This was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Class Action, Emerging Issues . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.