On February 1, 2018, lawsuits filed in federal district courts around the country against Sorin Group USA, Inc., Sorin Deutschland GmbH, and LivaNova PLC began the process of being transferred to Harrisbug, Pennsylvania for coordinated proceedings in an MDL, or multidistrict litigation. Multidistrict litigation is often utilized to streamline complex cases where many plaintiffs have been injured by a drug, medical device, consumer product, or incident (such as the BP oil spill, hotel fires, airline crashes, etc.). The Sorin heater-cooler bacteria lawsuits stem from infections allegedly caused by the Sorin Stöckert 3T Heater-Cooler device, a machine that helps regulate a patient’s body temperature during cardiothoracic surgery.
The First Attempt at Coordination Denied in Early 2017
In March 2017, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation held a hearing on the first effort to coordinate then-pending Sorin cases into an MDL. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation is the group of federal court judges that determine whether multidistrict coordination is necessary.
In the first petition, a group of plaintiffs asked that the cases be re-assigned to a federal judge in South Carolina. The initial request for coordination included fifteen individual lawsuits filed in South Carolina as well as North Carolina, Iowa, South Dakota, and Pennsylvania. The Defendants vigorously opposed the establishment of an MDL initially. They argued that there were too few cases pending, that the parties were already informally coordinating with success, and that the cases were too dissimilar to benefit from coordinated discovery – especially since the Defendants contended that discovery would be focused on the actions of the hospitals and surgeons with regard to their use of the heater-cooler devices in individual surgeries rather than more generic issues focused on the presence of a general defect in the heater-cooler products that were sold around the world.
The Judicial Panel denied the request for coordination in an April 5, 2017 order. The Panel found that the individual federal lawsuits pending around the country were already moving at an acceptable pace and the judges assigned to the fewer than 20 individual lawsuits could coordinate informally and still achieve the desired efficiencies regarding discovery and prosecution of the cases.
It is speculated that the Judicial Panel denied this initial request for coordination due to the relatively small number of cases pending at the time as well as the fact that some of the cases had been pending for quite some time and were quite advanced in pretrial proceedings. In most instances where the Judicial Panel has granted an MDL and ordered national coordination, there are at least 50 lawsuits pending, and most MDLs involve thousands of individual lawsuits.
Following denial of the MDL petition in April, plaintiffs’ lawyers around the country continued to work together to engage in informal cooperation and the sharing of resources in the hopes of achieving some of the same efficiencies that can be achieved through MDL proceedings without experiencing the delays that are also, unfortunately, part of the MDL process. In the months that followed, additional individual lawsuits were filed in state and federal courts and trial preparation continued in the filed cases.
New Cases Lead to a Second Petition – and a JPML Change of Heart
In a surprising turn of events in November 2017, the Defendants filed a motion to establish an MDL and coordinate the litigation. It is unusual for the Judicial Panel to grant such a motion when they have already denied coordination, but second requests are often made. In its petition, Sorin and LivaNova noted that it was facing 40 individual lawsuits at that time, including the 26 that were pending at the time of the initial request for coordination plus additional personal injury and wrongful death cases filed involving heater-cooler-induced mycobacterium infections in Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Tennessee. Some plaintiffs filed briefs opposing the manufacturers’ coordination request due to concerns that the establishment of an MDL might delay cases that had been pending for several years and were approaching trial dates, while others supported the renewed request. The Judicial Panel heard arguments for and against the motion in late January of 2018.
On February 1, 2018, the Judicial Panel issued an order granting the Defendants’ request. This order established MDL No. 2816, known as In Re: Sorin 3T Heater-Cooler System Products Liability Litigation (No. II), and transferred all pending federal court cases to Judge John E. Jones, III, a federal court judge in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Judge Jones was already presiding over other Stöckert 3T cases, including the Whipkey case which should be the first heater-cooler case to be tried before a jury in 2019. Judge Jones recently held an introductory phone conference with the attorneys involved in the 40 filed cases and is expected to hold some preliminary hearings in the coming weeks.
In addition to the federal court cases, there are also several cases concurrently pending in state court venues, primarily in Pennsylvania, Iowa, and California. Many of these cases involve local defendants, including the hospitals. Most of the federal court cases are solely focused on product liability claims against the heater-cooler manufacturers and do not include claims against the hospitals, as it is believed that the hospital and surgical personnel acted appropriately with regard to use and attempts to clean the heater-cooler device given the information that they were provided by the manufacturers as well as the challenges in being able to properly decontaminate the heater-cooler system due to its inherent design defects.
Nontuberculous Mycobacterium (NTM) Infections
Currently, most of the pending cases involve patients who developed M. chimera mycobacterium infections after undergoing a surgical procedure (usually a heart or transplant surgery) where a Stöckert 3T heater-cooler device was utilized. It is estimated that several hundred thousand patients may have undergone procedures and potentially been exposed to contaminated water that circulates through this medical device.
Over the past 12 months, many hospitals have written to patients to alert them to this potential exposure, although not all hospitals have yet to do so. It is believed that Sorin has the majority of the market share for heater-cooler device sales in the United States, which is why so many patients were potentially exposed. The good news is that the actual number of patients that have been diagnosed with confirmed mycobacterium infections suspected to have been caused by contaminated aerosolized water coming from the Stöckert 3T heater-cooler devices is relatively small.
While the reported governmental investigations have focused on the M. chimera mycobacterium, other forms of non-tuberculous mycobacterium infections have been reported in the FDA’s MAUDE database as coming from the Stöckert 3T heater-cooler devices. These other non-tuberculous mycobacterium infections include but are not limited to, the following: M. abscessus, M. chelonae, M. fortuitum, M. gordonae, M. intracellulare, and M. kansasii.
In the coming months as the state court and MDL proceedings move into the expert witness discovery phase, more efforts will be focused on identifying the precise species that are non-tuberculous mycobacterium that can be scientifically and legally linked to use of the Sorin 3T heater-cooler devices.
