New Pradaxa Lawsuit Joins Multidistrict Litigation

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A New York woman has filed a Pradaxa lawsuit against Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., alleging that the anticoagulant caused the plaintiff to suffer from life-threatening complications. Plaintiff Barbara Brown alleges she suffered debilitating, disfiguring, life-long injuries as a result of the medication.

Pradaxa is an anticoagulant or blood thinner, a drug designed to decrease a person’s ability to form blood clots. When blood clots form within the body, they can cause catastrophic medical problems. Specifically, when a blood clot forms within the blood vessels that supply the heart, lungs, brain, and other critical tissues and organs, it can cause crippling and life-threatening injuries.

Drugs like Pradaxa are designed to mitigate this risk by making it harder for blood to clot. Unfortunately, clotting is also the only thing that prevents people from bleeding to death when they are injured, and anticoagulants carry the risk of preventing people from clotting when they need to.

It has been alleged that Pradaxa is more dangerous than older anticoagulants. One of the major risks to all patients taking anticoagulants is uncontrollable bleeding. However, older drugs like Warfarin have known reversal agents. This means that in the event of uncontrolled bleed, a second drug can be administered to block the effect of the anticoagulant.

Brown’s Pradaxa lawsuit alleges that the Boehringer Ingelheim was well aware that Pradaxa had no reversal agent for uncontrolled bleeding, but did not stress this to physician’s in the drug’s warnings, and promoted the drug as being as safe as older anticoagulants. Additionally, internal studies by Boehringer Ingelheim have allegedly found that patients taking Pradaxa could benefit from the same type of regular blood testing, just as patients taking Warfarin already do. However, Boehringer Ingelheim has promoted Pradaxa as not requiring such blood tests.

Brown’s Pradaxa lawsuit is joining others in a type of group litigation called a multidistrict litigation (MDL) or mass tort. MDLs are used when the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation coordinates a number of similar lawsuits together.

MDLs are similar to class action lawsuits in some ways, in that both involve a group of plaintiffs alleging that they have suffered similar harms from the same defendant. Both MDLs and class action lawsuits are designed to help streamline the legal system by combining dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual lawsuits into a single legal procedure.

The main difference between an MDL and class action lawsuits is that class action lawsuits start out as a group lawsuit, while MDLs start out as individual lawsuits that are later merged into a single coordinated legal preceding. This makes drug lawsuits more likely to take the form of an MDL, since the people who file drug lawsuits have injuries that vary.

The Pradaxa lawsuit is Barbara Brown v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharamaceutics Inc., filed within the MDL In re: Pradaxa (Dabigatran Etexilate) Products Liabiltiy Litigation, MDL No. 2385, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois.

Join a Free Pradaxa Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you or a loved one were medically diagnosed with internal bleeding problems after using Pradaxa, you may be able to take legal action against the drug’s manufacturer. Joining a Pradaxa class action lawsuit or filing an individual Pradaxa lawsuit may help you recover compensation for medical bills, pain and suffering, and other damages. Obtain a free case evaluation now:

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