AbbVie Ordered to Pay $15 Million in Spina Bifida Suit
A federal jury in its home state of Illinois has ordered US drugmaker AbbVie to pay $15 million to cover current medical expenses and future care for a 10-year-old boy in California born with spina bifida, whose mother took the company’s Depakote drug for bipolar depression during pregnancy.
The jurors said the drugmaker failed to properly inform the mother of Stevie Gonzales and her doctors that Depakote could cause birth defects. However, it declined to award punitive damages for AbbVie’s alleged mishandling of the drug.
Some 700 0ther Depakote-related lawsuits are said to be pending in US courts. The Illinois case is the second the company based in North Chicago has lost, while winning three others.
In a preceding case, a jury in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2015 awarded $38 million to a girl with spina bifida in 2015, including $23 million in punitive damages. The next lawsuits are due to be head in state court in St. Louis in July, followed by another in federal court in Illinois in September.
In the cases Abbevie won, the juries said Depakote’s label clearly disclosed the risk of birth defects, the drugmaker told news agencies.
AbbVie accepted retained liability for the Depakote suits when it was spun off from Abbott Laboratories in 2013. The drug’s potential risks have been publicly known for over a decade, reports said. Studies linking Depakote to birth defects published in 2006 prompted US federal regulators put a strong pregnancy-use warning on the drug’s safety label, according to the news agency Bloomberg.
In 2012, Abbott is said to have paid $1.6 billion to settle federal and state claims resulting from an investigation of its Depakote marketing practices. At the time, prosecutors said the company marketed the drug for unapproved uses beyond the approved uses in epilepsy, bipolar mania and migraine prevention.
