Tepezza Hearing Loss Claimants Seek To Consolidate 10 Lawsuits Against Horizon Therapeutics Filed in Northern District of Illinois

Horizon has objected to the call to consolidate Tepezza hearing loss lawsuits, claiming the cases will be too different to benefit from pretrial coordination.

With a growing number of Tepezza hearing loss lawsuits being filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, each raising similar allegations that Horizon Therapeutics failed to warn about potential side effects of the thyroid eye disease drug, a group of Plaintiffs have filed a motion asking that all of the claims be consolidated before one judge.

Tepezza (teprotumumab-trbw) is a new-generation biologic treatment that was just introduced in January 2020, as the first medication approved to treat thyroid eye disease, which is caused by hyperthyroidism and linked to Graves’ disease, resulting in inflammation of eye muscles, eyelids, tear glands and fatty tissues behind the eye. This can lead to blurred or double vision and can cause the eyes to appear to bulge. However, a number of users have reported experiencing irreversible hearing loss from Tepezza.

At least 10 claimants have already filed a Tepezza lawsuit, each alleging they have been left with permanent ringing in the ears or hearing damage, which may have been avoided if warnings and information about the potential risk had been disclosed to users and the medical community.

The Tepezza hearing loss claimants each allege Horizon knew or should have known about the risk before the drug was made available to the medical community. However, rather than fully testing their new treatment and warning about the importance of monitoring for hearing damage, lawsuits claim the company aggressively marketed the niche treatment and generated a new blockbuster drug, with annual sales in excess of $1 billion.

According to a joint status report (PDF) filed on January 11, there are ten Tepezza lawsuits currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, where the Dublin-based drug maker’s U.S. headquarters are located.

Given similar questions of fact and law raised in each of the complaints, a group of plaintiffs filed a motion (PDF) last month, calling one judge to be appointed in the district to preside over all of the claims, to avoid duplicative discovery, contradictory rulings and scheduling orders.

However, Horizon Therapeutics filed a response (PDF) last week, objecting to the proposed consolidation, claiming the cases involve substantially enough different facts and defenses that they would not benefit from coordinated pretrial proceedings.

January 2023 Tepezza Lawsuit Update

While centralized management of the lawsuits over Tepezza would be similar to a multidistrict litigation, or MDL, since each of these claimants have already filed their claims in one district, coordination would be approved at the local level.

It is widely expected that the size and scope of the litigation will continue to increase over the coming months, as more former users discover that their hearing damage was caused by Tepezza.

Tepezza is an insulin-like growth factor 1 receptor (IGF-IR) inhibitor medication, and it is well known that IGF-I is crucial to protecting the inner ear hair cells from noise-induced hearing damage, ischemia and medication toxicity. Therefore, Tepezza claimants allege that the drug maker should have recognized that hearing loss would be a potential side effect, and provided warnings about the importance of monitoring during treatment and obtaining hearing tests before use.