Over ten thousand plaintiffs have made Xarelto lawsuit news by bringing an enormous mass litigation against the drug’s manufacturers.

Plaintiffs allege Xarelto’s manufacturers failed to properly warn them about the risks of bleeding associated with the anticoagulant drug.

In just a few years, the group of Xarelto lawsuits has grown into a massive complex litigation coordinated by a single federal court.

According to Xarelto lawsuit news, the Xarelto multidistrict litigation, or MDL, was set up in December 2014 by an order from the federal Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.

That order consolidated 21 separate Xarelto lawsuits into a single action, to be overseen by U.S. District Judge Eldon E. Fallon of the Eastern District of Louisiana in New Orleans.

Huge Number of Cases Makes Xarelto Lawsuit News

In the two years since that order, thousands of plaintiffs have joined the fray. Xarelto lawsuit news published in November 2016 showed there were over 13,000 individual Xarelto lawsuits filed in the MDL.

The first trial in the Xarelto MDL is scheduled to begin in March 2017. This “bellwether” trial was originally scheduled to begin in mid-February, then postponed to avoid conflicting with the NBA All-Star Game that will also be going on in New Orleans, according to recent Xarelto lawsuit news.

Plaintiffs in these claims are generally patients who suffered from severe bleeding injuries after taking Xarelto. Many plaintiffs report suffering from gastrointestinal bleeding or intracranial hemorrhage.

Some of the alleged injuries were severe enough to be life-threatening. In cases where patients’ Xarelto injuries turned out to be fatal, relatives have brought legal claims for wrongful death and other claims on behalf of the late patient’s estate.

Xarelto is an anticoagulant medication. It’s frequently used to help reduce the risk of stroke that patients with atrial fibrillation must live with. It is also used to treat clot-related injuries like pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis, and to prevent those conditions from coming back once they’ve already occurred.

Inherent in the use of any anticoagulant is a risk that the patient will suffer from excessive bleeding. By impairing the blood’s natural ability to clot, these drugs may cause any bleeding injury that occurs to result in much more bleeding than normal.

Xarelto is one of a group of new oral anticoagulants that were developed as an alternative to warfarin, a much older drug that had been the anticoagulant of choice for decades.

These new drugs were designed to have certain advantages over warfarin, such as no need for dietary restrictions or constant blood testing.

But unlike warfarin, Xarelto was released into the market with no available antidote. To date, there is no drug available that can reverse Xarelto’s anticoagulant effect in case of emergency.

Plaintiffs in the Xarelto MDL often take issue with the lack of an antidote. Some cite it as evidence that Xarelto is a defective and dangerous product. Others argue that the lack of an antidote is just one of many other dangers that manufacturers Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Bayer failed to adequately warn patients about.