A Pradaxa settlement is giving hope to plaintiffs in another group of similar lawsuits being waged over similar side effects associated with Xarelto.

Both Xarelto and Pradaxa have been implicated in thousands of products liability lawsuits alleging their manufacturers failed to adequately warn patients and doctors about the risk of excessive bleeding associated with the anticoagulant drugs.

The Xarelto multidistrict litigation, or MDL, began in December 2014 with a handful of Xarelto lawsuits consolidated into a single federal court in Louisiana.

Since then, the number of claims in the MDL has grown to include over 4,500 individual Xarelto lawsuits. Four hundred new cases were added in the month of August 2015 alone.

Pradaxa Settlement Resolves Thousands of Claims

Xarelto plaintiffs are optimistic that a settlement previously reached in a similar Pradaxa litigation will encourage Xarelto manufacturer Janssen Pharmaceuticals to reach a similar agreement.

In May 2014, pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim announced a Pradaxa settlement that would pay $650 million to settle 4,000 claims in both state and federal court.

This Pradaxa settlement arose out of a similar consolidation of several Pradaxa lawsuits in August 2012 into their own MDL in a federal court in Illinois.

Both Xarelto and Pradaxa are members of a new class of blood thinner medication that recently entered the market to compete with the old standby medication warfarin.

Pradaxa was the first of these drugs to hit the market, approved by the FDA in 2010. Xarelto was approved soon thereafter in 2011.

The two drugs have yielded substantial revenues for their respective manufacturers. By 2012, sales of Pradaxa had reached $1.5 billion. And in 2015, Xarelto brought in about $2 billion in sales for Bayer and for Janssen Pharmaceutical’s parent company Johnson & Johnson.

But in the litigation over each of these drugs, plaintiffs take issue with how their manufacturers handled the risk of excessive bleeding associated with these drugs. All blood thinner medication creates a risk of bleeding injury.

The plaintiffs in these claims generally say the companies should have done a better job of warning patients and doctors about the relevant risks.

Many plaintiffs take issue with the fact that both of these drugs were put on the market with no available antidote to stem their anticoagulant effects.

In contrast to warfarin, whose anticoagulant effect can be reversed by administering vitamin K, neither Xarelto nor Pradaxa had any similar antidote at the time they were released.

At the same time, the plaintiffs allege, the drugs’ manufacturers marketed their products as being safer and more convenient than warfarin. Plaintiffs say they were not adequately informed of this fact when they chose to take either of the newer drugs.

Plaintiffs also allege a lack of warning about specific bleeding injuries, such as gastrointestinal bleeding, hemorrhage in or around the brain and an increased risk of bleeding injuries in older patients and other at-risk populations.

Some plaintiffs allege the manufacturers had vital safety information about these and other issues, yet failed to disclose that information in a way that would allow patients to make an informed decision.