GlaxoSmithKline has been ordered to pay out $2.5 million in a lawsuit over birth defects allegedly associated with its antidepressant Paxil.
Bloomberg reports that 599 similar cases are in the pipeline (personally I wonder how many potentially $2.5m a year grossing drugs are in GSK’s pipeline).
“The first win is always huge, especially when you get a jury saying the drug caused the injury,” says Sean Tracey, the lawyer for the family of Lyam Kilker, who was born with heart defects and whose mother was using Paxil.
The Philadelphia Inquirer notes:
By a 10-2 margin, jurors said Glaxo officials had “negligently failed to warn” the doctor treating [Kilker’s mother Michelle] David about Paxil’s risks and concluded the medicine was a “factual cause” of the child’s heart defects.
But the jury also found that Glaxo’s handling of the drug was not “outrageous”, meaning the family could not seek punitive damages against the drugmaker.
Glaxo plan to appeal the verdict and said via a statement to both Bloomberg and the Inquirer that “While we sympathize with Lyam Kilker and his family, the scientific evidence does not establish that exposure to Paxil during pregnancy caused his condition.”
Bloomberg also notes one analyst who is not convinced this ruling is a huge blow for the pharma company. Navid Malik, of Matrix Corporate Capital in London, told the wire service, “If this was a threat to GSK, the first verdict might have been 100 times greater.”
Stockbroker Panmure Gordon seems to share this view. The Sharecast website quotes the company saying:
With a further 600 similar cases in the queue, a liability totalling $1.5bn is possible. We note the company is likely to appeal and our analysis of the situation makes us confident that the liability will not amount to anywhere near $1.5bn
Clearly the jury thought the information was suppressed. In that, we think the company will have a good chance of winning on appeal and we expect the company to also prevail against a number of the remaining 600 cases.
Image: by ~! via Flickr under creative commons.