Lawyers for London-based AstraZeneca will try to persuade jurors that Seroquel didn’t contribute to Ted Baker’s diabetes and the drugmaker didn’t hide its health risks, said Dan Carlat, a psychiatrist at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston who writes about antipsychotics drugs.
“The question is whether the links between Seroquel and diabetes are strong enough to convince a jury the drug is at fault,” Carlat said in an interview. Seroquel, with sales of $4.9 billion last year, is the company’s second-biggest seller after the ulcer treatment Nexium.
Former Seroquel users will have to convince each jury the drug was a specific cause of their diabetes, said Betsy Grey, an Arizona State University law professor who teaches product- liability and mass-tort law.
“In many states, the drug doesn’t have to be the single cause of the injury, but it has to be singled out as a substantial and significant factor,” Grey said. “That’s still very, very difficult to prove.”
The company faces almost 26,000 claims that Seroquel caused diabetes, it said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. That’s a 65 percent increase in cases over the number in a January 2009 regulatory filing.
Many of those suing also claim AstraZeneca promoted Seroquel, government-approved for schizophrenic and bipolar patients, to treat other conditions.
U.S. District Judge Anne Conway in Orlando, Florida, overseeing pretrial proceedings in federal Seroquel litigation, will ask a panel of judges to return the 6,000 cases consolidated before her to their home courts for trial, she said in November.
Carlat, of Tufts, noted that some AstraZeneca internal documents unsealed in the litigation show company officials expressed concern about the drug’s potential for causing weight gain and high blood-sugar levels in some users.
Carlat prescribes Seroquel for “a very limited” number of patients, he said.
“There are a lot of real smoking guns when you look through the documents that have been unsealed,” the psychiatrist said. That may make it easier for jurors to reject AstraZeneca’s arguments that the drug didn’t cause diabetes, he added.
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