Pending lawsuits involving Abilify manufacturers Otsuka Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Myers Squibb will be consolidated in an Abilify MDL in Florida federal court.

Both plaintiffs and defendants agreed on this move.

As is often the case, a number of lawsuits against a single company by multiple plaintiffs in various parts of the country share similar causes of action and questions of fact.

Purpose of the Abilify MDL

The Abilify MDL includes claims that the medication may cause compulsive behaviors in patients such as gambling or shopping, among other addictive issues.

Among these allegations is the question of whether or not the manufacturers of Abilify were aware of the seriousness of those side effects, and if warnings were sufficient.

The main purpose and benefit of multidistrict litigation (MDL) is increased efficiency. Centralizing a large number of cases with similar claims help to prevent duplicate effort on the part of the attorneys in the discovery process.

The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) is a special judicial body that determines if certain civil actions warrant transfer from their various jurisdictions and consolidation to one venue.

So far, there are twenty-two separate lawsuits from twelve different jurisdictions that are to be centralized in the Abilify MDL in Florida.

Twenty more actions are pending across the country, according to the JPML panel. All or some of these cases may be incorporated into the Abilify MDL.

Two additional cases have been withdrawn by plaintiffs, while two more have been remanded to their original jurisdictions.

The judge selected to preside over the Abilify MDL is the Honorable Margaret C. Rodgers, who was appointed to the Northern District of Florida by President George W. Bush in November of 2003.

Abilify Compulsive Behavior Risks

Starting in fall 2012, the European Medicines Agency started requiring Bristol-Myers and Otsuka to warn about the risk of pathological gambling and to include warnings on labels that patients without a prior history of gambling could start compulsively betting, many of these consolidated Abilify lawsuits state.

And in November, Canadian regulators found that there was an increased risk of uncontrollable gambling and hypersexuality, and warnings were added to Abilify labeling in that country, according to complaints.

By omitting these warnings in the U.S., plaintiffs said the companies have made significantly more revenue from Abilify in the U.S. than in Europe.

In fact the drug maker reported that U.S. revenues from the drug’s sales totaled $417 million over three months in 2014, while worldwide revenues were $555 million over the same period, according to the lawsuits.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration moved to add warnings about “uncontrollable urges” to the drug label and medication guides in May.

The agency said at the time that it had seen 184 reports of compulsive behavior from people who took Abilify since 2002, including 164 reports of problem gambling, nine reports of compulsive sexual behavior and four reports of compulsive shopping.

The Abilify MDL is In re: Abilify Compulsive Behavior Products Liability Litigation before the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.