Two women have filed a class-action lawsuit against Allergan (NYSE:AGN), alleging that the company’s textured breast implants gave them a rare form of cancer.
Separately, a California judge dismissed two lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) subsidiary Mentor Worldwide over injuries allegedly caused by Mentor’s silicone breast implants.
In the suit against Allergan, a woman from Michigan claims that she began having symptoms of BIA-ALCL, a type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma linked to breast implants, in February 2019, 14 months after she received Allergan Biocell textured implants. The woman spent $11,079 on the implants and surgery. The second woman, from California, received Biocell implants in 2016 and has since developed BIA-ALCL, according to the complaint. They are suing Allergan to pay for the implants’ removal, which the company has refused to do.
The FDA asked Allergan to recall Biocell implants in July 2019. Five months earlier, the agency said it had received reports of 457 unique cases of BIA-ALCL related to breast implants since 2010, including nine patient deaths. The women suing Allergan claim that the company failed to report all adverse events related to its Biocell implants to the FDA. They requested anonymity from the court.
In one lawsuit against J&J’s Mentor Worldwide, Mary Sewell of California and 20 other plaintiffs claim they developed a number of ailments due to the silicone in Mentor’s MemoryGel implants. In the second J&J lawsuit, California resident Brittany Billetts and four other women made similar claims. Judge André Birotte Jr. tossed both lawsuits because the plaintiffs were suing under California state law and medical devices are covered under federal law. Their lawsuits also failed to show that Mentor failed to report adverse events to the FDA, Birotte wrote.