A Colorado woman filed a Januvia lawsuit against Merck & Co. and other drug makers, alleging that the drug caused her to develop thyroid cancer when she was only 24-years old.

Plaintiff Delois Degraffe took Januvia, Janumet, Victoza, and Byetta to help control her diabetes. All of these drugs belong to the incretin mimetic group of diabetes drugs and bear structural and pharmacological similarities. Degraffe’s Januvia lawsuit was filed against the makers of each of the drugs including Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly and Company, Merck, and Novo Nordisk.

According to the Januvia lawsuit, Degraffe began to take the drugs in July 2012, and continued to take them through September of that year, when she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She alleges that these drugs caused her thyroid cancer.

Several studies have found that people taking incretin mimetics have an increased risk of developing thyroid cancer and pancreatic cancer.

Januvia lawsuits like Degraffe’s allege that the earliest animal trials of the drug found an increased risk of certain types of cancer in mammals.

Additionally, once these drugs hit the market, epidemiological studies, like a 2011 study published in the journal Gastroenterology found that taking drugs like Janumet, Victoza, Byetta, and other incretin mimetics came with an increased risk of developing pancreatitis, and cancers of the thyroid and pancreas.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) included cases of thyroid and pancreatic cancer, leading to epidemiological studies of this data, which found a 4.73-fold increase in the risk of cancers with some incretin mimetics.

Januvia lawsuits like Degraffe’s allege that drug manufacturers were aware, or reasonably should have been aware, of the risk of pancreatic and thyroid cancer allegedly linked to these drugs.

Under federal law, drug makers have a duty to monitor medical journals and systems like AERS for signs that there are unforeseen consequences to their drugs. These Januvia lawsuits further allege that not only was the drug maker aware of these risks, but that they actively concealed the risks and continued to manufacture and promote these drugs for profit.

The legal action over Januvia, Byetta, and other incretin mimetics has taken the form of a multidistrict litigation (MDL) or mass tort. MDLs are coordinated groups of individual lawsuits.

MDLs are similar in some ways to class action lawsuits. In both class action lawsuits and MDLs, a group of plaintiffs allege that they have suffered similar harm at the hands of the same defendants. The main difference is that class actions start out as group lawsuits, while MDLs start as very similar individual lawsuits which are later grouped into an MDL.

Both MDLs and class action lawsuits are designed to help streamline the legal process by combining tens, hundreds, or even thousands of potential individual lawsuits into a single legal process.

The Januvia Lawsuit is Delois Degraffe v. Amylin Pharmaceuticals LLC, et al., Case No. 3:14-cv-02049-BAS-DHB, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

The Januvia MDL is In Re: Incretin-Based Therapies Products Liabilities Litigation, MDL No. 2452, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.