Pfizer has won a defense verdict in a Philadelphia Zoloft birth defects lawsuit, despite evidence that Pfizer’s scientists may have known of a link between Zoloft and birth defects.

Documents presented at trial reveal Pfizer may have been aware of the possibility of Zoloft birth defects. A report from 1998 shows Pfizer’s reviewers put the company on notice back then that Zoloft may have a link to certain birth defects. The report refers to 25 instances of “congenital abnormalities” and other problems that could possibly have been related to Zoloft. In 16 of those cases, researchers found “no obvious cause” for the defects other than the mother’s use of Zoloft.

More recently, an internal report from April 2014 shows a related statement from an associate director of Pfizer’s Worldwide Safety Strategy unit’s epidemiology group. The assistant director said she had reviewed scientific studies that demonstrated a link between Zoloft and congenital cardiac defects that could be causal. She also said researchers had found a relationship between Zoloft and a defect called omphalocele, in which a malformation of the abdominal wall allows organs to develop outside the abdomen.

The report also shows the assistant director’s recommendation that Pfizer add a mention of some of those research findings to the labeling for Zoloft.

Pfizer discounted the significance of the reports, saying plaintiffs’ attorneys are using them out of context and ignoring the conclusions in the reports.

A child’s septal defect was in fact the injury at issue in this Zoloft lawsuit. The plaintiffs were the family of an 8-year-old girl who was born with a septal defect in her heart after her mother took Zoloft during pregnancy. The plaintiffs argued their daughter’s septal defect was a side effect of Zoloft, for which they sought $2.4 million in damages.

This Zoloft Birth Defects Lawsuit is Case No. 778 and Control No. 14123047., in the the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County.

Zoloft Birth Defect Lawsuits

Since its 1991 introduction to the U.S. drug market, Zoloft has been a huge financial success for Pfizer. Annual sales of Zoloft peaked in the billions in 2005, just before Pfizer lost patent protection and generic equivalents entered the market.

The most recent defense verdict is the second such verdict Pfizer has won in as many Zoloft birth defect lawsuits. In April 2015, a St. Louis jury was not convinced that Zoloft caused a boy’s congenital heart defect that required three open heart surgeries and a pacemaker.

Despite its initial success, Pfizer is still facing over 1,000 Zoloft lawsuits regarding birth defects possibly related to that drug. A number of these have been consolidated into a multidistrict litigation now pending before Judge Cynthia Rufe in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. A multidistrict litigation is a procedural device often used by the federal court system in large-scale products liability litigation, where many individual claims have common issues that can be more efficiently managed by a single judge in a single court.

The first few cases to go to trial in the multidistrict litigation are scheduled to begin in January 2016.