A Dallas jury has awarded six DePuy hip implant patients $247 million who were injured by the faulty hip implant device. DePuy Orthodopedics, a division of Johnson & Johnson, faces nearly 9,700 more lawsuits.
Delivering a third straight win to patients, the jury found that the metal-on-metal hip implants were defectively designed and that the companies failed to warn consumers about the risks.
Six New York residents implanted with the devices said they experienced tissue death, bone erosion and other injuries they blamed on design flaws.
During the Dallas trial, patients argued that DePuy had marketed their metal-on-metal hips as more durable and less prone to wear out. However, patients were never warned of the faulty design of the metal-on-metal hips.
Thursday’s verdict came in the fourth test trial over the devices in Dallas federal court, where some 9,000 of the cases are pending. Test cases have been selected for trial, and their outcomes will help gauge the value of the remaining claims and inform potential settlement talks.
The Johnson & Johnson Depuy artificial hip implant had been recalled due to adverse event reports that between 12% and 13% of the Johnson & Johnson DePuy hip implants had to be surgically removed and replaced with new implants.
The DePuy ASR hips were first implanted in the U.S. in 2006. The FDA cleared them for sale in the U.S. in 2005 but did not perform a detailed review called a premarket approval or PMA. The FDA relied on DePuy’s representation that the implants were similar enough to other products already on the market that an in-depth premarket approval review was unnecessary.
However, juries are correcting a gross injustice by siding with injured victims of the defective hip implants. These hip implants never worked and caused untold suffering to innocent people who were sold a bogus product by an overzealous and greedy medical device company only interested in increasing their profit margin.