An Oregon woman filed a Janumet lawsuit against the makers of several type-2 diabetes drugs, alleging that the drugs caused her to develop potentially fatal pancreatic cancer.

Plaintiff Barbara Dashney’s pancreatic cancer lawsuit alleges that several diabetes drugs she took led to her contracting a particularly deadly form of cancer.

According to the text of her pancreatic cancer lawsuit, Dashney took various combinations of Byetta, Janumet, and Victoza between 2009, and 2012, and took them as directed under her physicians’ instruction and the manufacturers’ directions.

All of these drugs belong to the same family of diabetes drugs, called incretin mimetics, which have all been alleged to increase a person’s risk of pancreatic cancer. Dashney was diagnosed with this disease in 2013, she claims in her Janumet lawsuit.

Pancreatic cancer is a particularly deadly form of cancer. The pancreas has very few pain receptors. This means that patients with pancreatic cancer rarely feel any kind of symptoms until cancer spreads beyond the pancreas. Once cancer spreads, it is much harder to treat. With early detection unlikely, roughly three-quarters of patients die within a year of their diagnosis. The fiver year survival rate is only 5 percent to 6 percent, a dismal prognosis, even for cancer.

Janumet pancreatic cancer lawsuits like Dasheny’s have alleged that drugs like Byetta, Janumet and Victoza can radically increase a person’s risk of developing pancreatic cancer. These Janumet lawsuits allege that incretin mimetics have been shown by various studies — including some of the initial clinical trials of the drugs — to increase a person’s risk of pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer lawsuits allege that drug makers have not done enough to protect the public from the alleged risk of developing cancer from these drugs.

Dashney’s pancreatic cancer lawsuit has joined thousands of others in a type of coordinated group lawsuit called a multidistrict litigation, or MDL. In MDLs, a group of similar lawsuits are coordinated together.

This process is designed to help streamline the legal system, almost like a class action lawsuit. However, MDLs are much more common than class action lawsuits for drug lawsuits.

Since patients who develop medical problems like pancreatic cancer from drugs have injuries that vary they are more likely to file individual pancreatic cancer lawsuits instead of a class action lawsuit, which can later be grouped in an MDL. Once an MDL is created, individual lawsuits can still be added into them, as Dasheny’s legal counsel has requested for this pancreatic cancer lawsuit.

The Janumet Pancreatic Cancer Lawsuit is Barbara Dashney v. Amylin Pharmaceutical LLC, et al., Case No. 13md2452 AJB(MDD), within the MDL In Re: Incretin-Based Therapies Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2452, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.