The MDL court in the Testosterone Replacement Therapy ("TRT") litigation recently entered summary judgment in favor of a non-US manufacturer that did not distribute in the US, along with its US subsidiary. The judgment ended efforts to hold those two defendants, Besins Healthcare, S.A. and Besins Healthcare Inc., liable under a series of product liability claims for injuries allegedly caused by the use of AndroGel, a TRT product. In re Testosterone Replacement Therapy Prods. Liab. Litig. Coordinated Pretrial Proceedings, 2018 WL 2416239 (N.D. Ill. May 29, 2018).

The court knocked down each of the plaintiffs' claims in rather short order. Plaintiff's strict liability and negligent design defect claims fell because plaintiffs had no evidence of a defect. Plaintiffs tried to rely on allegations in the complaint. That doesn't cut it on summary judgment. Allegations are not evidence:

As the non-moving party, it is plaintiffs' burden to identify evidence to show why defendants are not entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Because plaintiffs have provided nothing more than quotations from their complaint and from this Court's order denying the Besins defendants' motion to dismiss, they have not met their burden.

Id. at *5. A lack of evidence also ended plaintiffs' manufacturing defect claim: "Plaintiffs present no evidence or argument that AndroGel suffers from a manufacturing defect. Thus the Court considers plaintiffs to have forfeited that negligence theory." Id. The court entered judgment against plaintiffs' defect claims.

More interesting was the Court's rejection of Plaintiffs' failure to test claim. Plaintiffs relied on an email from an R&D employee at a Besins subsidiary reacting to publications suggesting an association between AndroGel and cardiovascular risks. The employee wrote that "the community should be calling for further study" and that Besins should be "very careful . . . about getting into this discussion" because it might have an "ethical obligation" to conduct such studies as a company that profited from the manufacture of AndroGel. Id. at *2. It's not surprising that plaintiffs focused on this email.

But they did little else. In fact, plaintiffs' evidence went no further than the email, which on its own does not establish a failure to test claim. On the other hand, the Besins defendants, who were not distributors of AndroGel in the US, presented actual evidence undermining plaintiffs' claim. In particular, they relied on the R&D employee's deposition testimony in which he clarified that Besins did not have the right to conduct testing in the United States. Id. This went unchallenged, and the court found it dispositive:

Plaintiffs have provided nothing to support a contention that the Besins defendants have a duty to conduct safety studies in the United States. To the contrary, the undisputed evidence shows that the Besins defendants cannot do so, and plaintiffs have not attempted to reconcile that evidence with their position.

Id.

The court found other unfixable problems with plaintiffs' failure to test claim. Plaintiffs presented no evidence that Besins actually failed to test. The R&D employee's email certainly doesn't prove that. Plaintiffs also provided no evidence of a proximate causation, making no evidentiary connection between the alleged failure to test and their injuries:

[P]laintiffs have provided no evidence that the Besins defendants' alleged failure to test proximately caused plaintiffs' injuries. Plaintiffs' theory is that the Besins defendants' failure to adequately test AndroGel caused AbbVie [the company to whom Besins licensed the exclusive right to market and distribute AndroGel in the US] to lack sufficient information about AndroGel's risks. The alleged failure to test, plaintiffs say, thus "directly contributed to AbbVie's failure to provide an adequate warning to healthcare providers in the United States." Plaintiffs, however, do not cite any evidence to support this theory. Their conclusory argument is insufficient to withstand summary judgment.

Id.

The court also rejected plaintiffs' failure to report adverse reports claim. Plaintiffs described this claim as a failure to report adverse events to other manufacturers, industry experts and the FDA. Having so constructed their claim, however, plaintiffs presented no evidence or argument to establish that the Besins defendants had an enforceable duty to report adverse events to other manufacturers or industry experts. Id. at *6. For their part, the Besins defendants presented evidence that they had no duty to report AndroGel adverse events to the FDA. That responsibility instead fell solely to AbbVie, the company to whom the Besins defendants licensed the exclusive right to market and distribute AndroGel in the US. Id. With no duty, plaintiffs had no claim. Setting that aside, plaintiffs nonetheless presented no evidence that the Besins defendants failed to report any adverse event or that such failure proximately caused their injuries. Id. For all these reasons, the court entered judgment against plaintiffs' failure to report claim.

The upshot of this opinion appears to be that the non-distributor Besins defendants are our of the Hormone Replacement Therapy MDL.

This article is presented for informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute legal advice.