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A California jury...ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $417 million to a woman who claimed she developed ovarian cancer after using the company's talc-based products like Johnson's Baby Powder for feminine hygiene...The Los Angeles Superior Court jury's verdict in favor of California resident Eva Echeverria was the largest yet in lawsuits alleging J&J failed to adequately warn consumers about the cancer risks of its talc-based products...The verdict included $70 million in compensatory damages and $347 million in punitive damages. It was a major setback for J&J, which faces 4,800 similar claims nationally and has been hit with over $300 million in verdicts by juries in Missouri...The 63-year-old claimed she developed terminal ovarian cancer after decades of using J&J's products. Her lawyers argued J&J encouraged women to use its products despite knowing of studies linking ovarian cancer to genital talc use...

A Las Vegas doctor who drugged and raped patients was ordered Monday to serve 50 years to life behind bars...District Judge Kathleen Delaney called the case against Binh “Ben” Chung “abhorrent and unfathomable” and “incredibly disturbing” as she handed down the sentence...Chung testified...he had an ongoing consensual affair with one of the women, and that she was awake in the videos jurors watched, playing a role in his “Sleeping Beauty” fantasy...He said he had somnophilia, a fetish for having sex with someone who is unconscious. He also testified that the teenager prosecutors said he molested in another video was actually the woman with whom he claimed he had an affair...Chung, found guilty of 11 counts, including use of a minor in the production of pornography, kidnapping, battery with intent to commit sexual assault, and four counts of sexual assault, thanked the judge and attorneys on both sides, along with his family, but did not apologize...

Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical entrepreneur vilified as the "pharma bro" for raising the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000 percent, will go on trial...for what U.S. prosecutors called a Ponzi-like scheme at his former hedge fund and a drug company he once ran…The charges that led to his arrest in December 2015...focus on Shkreli's management at Retrophin and the hedge fund MSMB Capital Management between 2009 and 2012...Prosecutors said Shkreli lied about MSMB's finances to lure investors and concealed devastating trading losses from them. They said he paid the investors back with money stolen from Retrophin…

Lawyers for a Massachusetts pharmacy executive convicted of fraud for his role in a 2012 U.S. meningitis outbreak that killed 64 people asked a judge to order a new trial, charging that prosecutors misbehaved in providing evidence to the jury...Barry Cadden, co-founder of the now-defunct New England Compounding Center, was cleared of second-degree murder charges but was found guilty in March of racketeering and fraud for his role in shipping injectible steroids tainted with fungus linked to the deadly outbreak that also sickened 753 people in 20 states...Cadden's attorneys argued that prosecutors overreached in the number and severity of criminal charges that they filed against him. The attorneys said the prosecutors misled the jury by providing them a binder filled with laboratory tests showing that vials of steroids shipped by NECC were tainted but not providing comparable reports submitted by defense attorneys showing the vials were sterile.

Mylan NV…has finalized a $465 million settlement resolving U.S. Justice Department claims it overcharged the government for its EpiPen emergency allergy treatment, which became the center of a firestorm over price increases...The U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts...announced the accord, which was soon after criticized by some congressional members as being too easy on the drugmaker. It came 10 months after Mylan said it had reached a deal...The settlement resolved claims that Mylan avoided higher rebates to state Medicaid programs by misclassifying EpiPen as a generic product, even though it was marketed and priced as a brand-name product...Under the deal, Mylan did not admit wrongdoing. It will reclassify EpiPen and pay the rebate applicable to its new classification as of April 1, 2017...The deal followed a False Claims Act whistleblower lawsuit filed by French rival Sanofi SA in 2016, two years after it first raised the matter with authorities...Sanofi, which formerly marketed a rival product called Auvi-Q, will receive nearly $38.8 million as a reward from the government...

A lawyer for one of the country's largest manufacturers of prescription painkillers says the public has "no right of access" to the testimony of its former president about how the company marketed the dangerously addictive OxyContin...The Kentucky attorney general's office sued Purdue Pharma in 2007, accusing it of misleading the public about just how addictive the opioid-based painkiller really was. They said that helped fuel a wave of addiction in Appalachia and beyond that cost the state millions of dollars in health care costs...Former Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway settled the case in 2015 for $24 million with an agreement to keep some court documents hidden from public view. They included a deposition from Richard Sackler, a former Purdue Pharma president and member of the family that still controls the company. His testimony could offer important insights into how much the company knew about the drug's addictive qualities.

The highest court of the European Union ruled…that courts can consider whether a vaccination led to someone developing an illness even when there is no scientific proof…The decision was issued…in relation to the case of a Frenchman known as Mr. J.W., who was immunized against hepatitis B in late 1998-99. About a year later, Mr. J.W. was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In 2006, he and his family sued vaccine-maker Sanofi Pasteur in an attempt to be compensated for the damage they claim he suffered due to the vaccine. Mr. J.W. died in 2011… the EU's top court said that despite the lack of scientific consensus on the issue, a vaccine could be considered defective if there was "specific and consistent evidence," including the time between a vaccine's administration and the onset of a disease, an individual's previous state of health, the lack of any family history of the disease and a significant number of reported cases of the disease occurring following vaccination.

New Hampshire sued...Purdue Pharma LP...joining several state and local governments in accusing the drugmaker of engaging in deceptive marketing practices that have helped fuel a national opioid addiction epidemic...The lawsuit filed...claimed that Purdue Pharma significantly downplayed the risk of addiction posed by OxyContin and engaged in marketing practices that "opened the floodgates" to opioid use and abuse...The lawsuit came after the state's top court in June overturned a ruling that barred the enforcement of subpoenas against Purdue and four other drugmakers because of the use of a private law firm by the office of the attorney general...The complaint said...the...company had spent hundreds of millions of dollars since the 1990s on misleading marketing that overstated the benefits of opioids for treating chronic, rather than short-term, pain.

The National Community Pharmacists Association and the Arkansas Pharmacists Association have filed an amici curiae brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in support of the state of Arkansas and against a challenge by the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association to Act 900, passed by the Arkansas General Assembly in 2015. The ongoing legal battle has prevented Arkansas from implementing a more transparent system under which pharmacy benefit managers determine generic prescription drug reimbursements to pharmacies. In response, NCPA...issued the following statement:..."The Arkansas legislature approved Act 900 because it recognized that PBMs' secretive approach to determining generic prescription drug reimbursement was unfair to pharmacies and patients. Pharmacies deserve to know what their reimbursement will be for a medication, and that they can at least break-even on what they dispense. That's the kind of essential transparency Act 900 enacted. PCMA seems less interested in fairness and more interested in filling PBM corporations' pockets. They continue to spout specious arguments that would undermine legislators' intent...

A bipartisan group of state attorneys general announced...that they are jointly investigating the marketing and sales practices of drug companies that manufacture opioid painkillers at the center of a national addiction epidemic...Attorneys general from states including Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania announced the investigation two weeks after Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine sued five drug manufacturers for misrepresenting the risks of opioids...We are looking into what role, if any, marketing and related practices might have played in the increasing prescription and use of these powerful and addictive drugs…Officials did not specify which companies were under investigation...