Wilmington : AstraZeneca, which tentatively settled almost 4,000 product-liability cases last month involving its antipsychotic drug Seroquel through mediation, said it will keep terms of the agreements confidential.
"AstraZeneca remains committed to a strong defence effort, but will also continue to participate in good faith in the court-ordered mediation process," Tony Jewell, an AstraZeneca US spokesman, said on Friday.
The London-based company said in a regulatory filing that by the end of March, it was defending more than 10,000 cases involving 22,500 plaintiff groups. Some of the cases were previously dismissed because plaintiffs lacked sufficient evidence to support allegations that Seroquel causes diabetes.
The company, with $32.8 billion (Dh120 billion) in sales last year, said in the July 29 filing that by March, it had spent about $688 million defending Seroquel-related cases.
AstraZeneca agreed earlier to pay $2 million to settle more than 200 Seroquel cases, averaging about $10,000 each, people familiar with the agreements said. Those settlements were part of the same federal-court-ordered mediation. Some of the cases were filed in state courts, including New Jersey and Delaware. Others have been consolidated on the federal level with US District Judge Anne Conway in Orlando, Florida.
In the first Seroquel case to be tried, AstraZeneca won a jury verdict that the company properly warned doctors of a Vietnam War veteran of the drug's diabetes risk. A judge in Delaware dismissed three more cases saying there wasn't enough proof of a diabetes link.
Approval
On Thursday, AstraZeneca, facing expiring patents on its top-selling products, moved closer to winning US approval for a blood thinner to rival Plavix, the world's second-biggest drug.
Outside advisers to the Food and Drug Administration voted 7-1 in favour of using AstraZeneca's Brilinta to reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and death in patients with severe chest pain or earlier heart attacks. The panel said concerns that US study participants did worse on the drug than people in other countries may be the result of chance and could be examined in a future trial after the drug is approved.
Brilinta sales could reach $1.47 billion by 2016, according to the average estimate of three analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. AstraZeneca needs to replenish revenue over the next four years as patents expire on top-sellers Nexium, for heartburn, and the antipsychotic Seroquel, the generators of a combined $9.83 billion in 2009.
"From a commercial perspective, I do see a higher hurdle to capture share in the US," said Amit Roy, an analyst at Nomura International and cardiac surgeon, in a telephone interview on Friday from London.
