Duragesic Jury Award

(Marketwire) A jury in Chicago has found two Johnson & Johnson subsidiaries liable in the death of a Cicero, Ill., woman who died while using a Duragesic® patch, and ordered the companies to pay her family $16,560,000.

The verdict in the case involving 38-year-old Janice DiCosolo, a mother of three, was delivered in Judge Thomas Flanagan's courtroom in the Cook County Circuit Court, after a three-week trial.

When Mrs. DiCosolo died on February 15, 2004, she was using a Duragesic patch that her doctor prescribed to reduce the almost constant pain she experienced as a result of a neurological conditioncalled reflex sympathetic dystrophy. Duragesic is a patch containing a gel form of the drug fentanyl, which is 100-times stronger than morphine.

In the lawsuit, Mrs. DiCosolo's family argued that the defendants, Titusville, N.J.-based Janssen Pharmaceutica Inc. and Mountain View, Calif.-based ALZA Corporation, knew about the Duragesic patch's problems, which allowed the patches to leak fentanyl in amounts large enough to kill the patients using it. Both Janssen and ALZA are subsidiaries of Johnson & Johnson.

"They knew this patch was dangerous and defective but they continued to sell it and make money, and that's the only reason Janice DiCosolo is dead," says attorney Jim Orr of Heygood, Orr, Reyes, Pearson & Bartolomei (HORP&B) in Dallas, counsel for the DiCosolo family. "They even knew there was a safer design, one that would prevent the fentanyl from leaking, but they chose not to use it," added Orr's partner Michael Heygood, who also represented the DiCosolo family at trial.

 Scott Drake with Jim Orr