A New Jersey jury has handed drug maker AstraZeneca a defense verdict in the first trial over claims that side effects of Seroquel, a popular atypical antipsychotic, caused users to develop diabetes.
The Seroquel diabetes lawsuit was brought by 61-year-old former Vietnam veteran Ted Baker from Louisiana, who claimed that he contracted diabetes from Seroquel after taking it to alleviate his post-traumatic stress disorder. Baker’s lawsuit was the first case to go to trial out of thousands of similar lawsuits against AstraZeneca over the risk of diabetes from Seroquel.
About 26,000 Seroquel lawsuits have been filed in both state and federal court against AstraZeneca. The cases all contain similar allegations that AstraZeneca failed to adequately warn users about the risk of weight gain with Seroquel, which may increase the risk of diabetes, hyperglycemia and other injuries.
Baker’s lawsuit went to trial in New Jersey state court. Following a month-long trial, the jury deliberated for six hours before returning a defense verdict.
The decision was based on the individual circumstances of Baker’s case and does not have any precedential impact on other pending cases. AstraZeneca has indicated that it intends to continue to defend itself at trial in individual lawsuits, adopting a legal strategy of trying to show that each plaintiff either already suffered from diabetes or had a number of risk factors for the disease before taking Seroquel.
All federal Seroquel lawsuits over diabetes are consolidated for pretrial litigation in an MDL, or multidistrict litigation, that is centralized in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. In November, U.S. District Judge Anne Conway ordered lawyers for both sides to met with a mediator to see if there is any possibility for a Seroquel settlement before as many as 6,000 cases are sent back to the districts where they were originally filed for trial. Dozens of other cases have already been slated for trials, including at least 38 federal cases in the MDL.