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An Oklahoma judge this week blamed Johnson & Johnson for helping to create the state's opioid crisis, dealing the first major blow to a pharmaceutical company in the nationwide epidemic. SC Johnson, "a family company" did not appreciate the AG using its slogan to describe J&J and even threatened to sue. Meg Tirrell and Berkeley Lovelace Jr. have more on what we might expect next in the legal battle to hold drugmakers accountable for the opioid crisis.
(Are there any stories we should be chasing? Email tips, ideas, suggestions to CNBC Health Editor Dawn Kopecki at dawn.kopecki@nbcuni.com.)
| | Potential opioid settlement is on the horizon | J&J's loss in the Oklahoma opioid trial on Monday was greeted by Wall Street as a win – as the $572 million the company was ordered to pay to the state was less than investors feared. But that news was quickly eclipsed by reports the next day that Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family have proposed settling all the 2,000+ opioid cases against them for as much as $12 billion. As one analyst put it, the J&J loss means "there's blood in the water," and an expectation of a potential global settlement with other defendants in the rest of the pending cases could lead to a feeding frenzy. Whether Purdue's settlement proposal is accepted, though, is another question – and the next, of course, is what that means for the dozens of other defendant companies named in the expansive opioid litigation. J&J, of course, plans to appeal.
-Meg Tirrell | | | | Oklahoma's unusual legal strategy could inspire others | Oklahoma's unusual use of public nuisance laws to win its landmark suit against J&J could spur other states to see if their own property laws could be used in cases against opioid makers, legal scholars tell me. The law is generally used in cases that interfere with the use and enjoyment of public property – polluting rivers, possessing diseased animals or blaring loud noises – not for selling prescription drugs. One lawyer tells me that several legal theories in a lawsuit allow a jury to award for a broader array of damages. But he warned there is a downside — too many theories in a suit could confuse the judge or jury.
-Berkeley Lovelace Jr. | | | | Sales of consumer DNA tests are down — and we want to know why | Illumina, maker of the machines that sequence human DNA, has hinted in the past few earnings calls that the consumer DNA market isn't doing as well as it hoped. That includes companies like Ancestry and 23andMe, which have catalogued the saliva of roughly 30 million people. Illumina didn't share why sales are lower than expected for these tests, but we asked some health experts for their take. Across the board, we heard that consumer privacy fears are very real this year, especially in the wake of headlines about the Golden State Killer, who was tracked down by his distant relatives' DNA.
-Christina Farr | | | | From Jedis to Astronauts: How NASA tapped a video game maker for training | Sam Glassenberg thought making Star Wars video games was his dream job. Then, a fluke led him to turn his animation skills toward video games that help doctors learn medical procedures. Now, his start-up Level Ex has been tapped by NASA to help tackle the next frontier of medicine: developing games to help train astronauts to deal with medical issues they may encounter on the mission to Mars.
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