What would it be like to suffer alopecia hair loss—a permanent condition of baldness or semi-baldness that allegedly accompanies the use of Taxotere—after fighting for a life free of cancer?

Plaintiff Norma Jean W., a citizen and resident of the State of South Carolina knows, as do thousands of other plaintiffs filing complaints under Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) No. 2740.

This MDL is a Taxotere products liability litigation filed against the Sanofi Corp., makers of the popular breast cancer chemotherapy drug. The litigation focuses onalopecia hair loss, which patients claim the manufacturers knew about but allegedly willfully hid from the public and medical professional community in order to reap the most profit.

In the case of Norma Jean, she says she was administered the chemotherapy treatment for a three-month period between early August and November 2010. She claims that her hair fell out during her treatment period as would be expected with most runs of chemotherapy, but her alopecia hair loss remained.

Chemotherapy attempts to kill and restrain rapidly reproducing rogue cancer cells and, in the process, often takes out fast-growing cells associated with hair, skin, and fingernails and toenails.

Norma Jean was surprised and distressed to discover that her baldness was not a temporary treatment inconvenience, but a disfiguring case of alopecia hair loss of which she suffers to this present day.

In her filing on Nov. 6, 2018, the plaintiff brought several counts forward from the master complaint against Sanofi by all Taxotere sufferers of alopecia hair loss. Among them are Failure to Warn, Negligence, Negligent Misrepresentation, Fraudulent Misrepresentation, Fraudulent Concealment, and Fraud and Deceit.

Is The Stronger Version Responsible?

Bristol-Myers Squibb was the first to market Taxol, a chemotherapy drug whose compounds were gleaned from the yew plant family. Taxol was commercially approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1992. Taxol, like its counterpart Taxotere, was specifically designed to treat breast cancer in women.

In 1994, a new drug application for Taxotere was rejected by an FDA advisory committee on oncological drugs. The FDA reported that it needed to see a greater body of data supporting Taxotere’s overall safety.

Despite this initially conservative move, the stronger version of Taxol—Taxotere—was approved four years after its predecessor in 1996. Certain caveats came with the approval. It was reserved for cases of breast cancer that had not responded to alternative treatment or that had metastasized to other areas of the body or surrounding tissues.

According to the long form MDL complaint, the Sanofi company allegedly presented safety data from clinical trials paid for and directed by its own agency in order to gain FDA approval. Once garnered, the defendants worked to aggressively advertise the product as better than the milder Taxol.

The promotional campaigns allegedly relied upon this pseudo-data to back their claims of drug superiority, patients claim. The FDA eventually sent Sanofi a letter in 2009, warning the company that its advertising rendered Taxotere misbranded under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

The Alopecia Hair Loss Lawsuit is Case No. 2:18-cv-10552-JTM-MBN in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.