The lawsuit was filed by Laura R., a woman from Texas who was injured by the Denali® Inferior Vena Cava Filter (“IVC Filter”) manufactured by C.R. Bard and Bard Peripheral Vascular Inc.
Bard Denali© IVC Filter
The IVC Filter was surgically implanted at a hospital on May 20, 2016 for the prevention of blood clot complications in her lungs.
The Denali® is a 6th-generation Bard IVC Filter that was introduced in 2013. It is the only IVC Filter that Bard still sells — all of the previous generations were pulled off the market without safety recalls.
Bard tried to fix fracture problems on earlier generations of its IVC Filters by completely re-designing the Denali. Unlike older models, the Denali is made of different materials and is manufactured using single-piece laser-cutting technology.
Unfortunately, these design changes may not have fixed the fracture problems that plagued Bard’s other blood clot filters, like the Recovery® or G2® IVC Filters.
For example, a case report from 2015 describes a 46 year-old woman who required emergency open-heart surgery to remove a Denali IVC Filter that broke in several pieces.
Some of the broken pieces traveled to her heart and punctured her heart muscle, causing extreme chest pain and other complications.
She developed a life-threatening irregular heart rhythm disorder known as cardiac tamponade as a result of the IVC Filter puncturing through her heart muscle. According to her doctors:
Electron microscopic fragment analysis revealed high-cycle metal fatigue indicating the filter design failed to withstand this patient’s natural inferior vena cava biomechanical motions.”
The study suggests that the Denali® IVC Filter may have devastating design flaws. Lawyers accuse Bard of selling a defective medical device and failing to warn doctors or patients about the serious risks.
The lawsuit was filed on July 20, 2017 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona — Case No. 2:17-cv-02430-DGC.
The case will be transferred into a centralized federal litigation where there are now over 2,200 IVC filter lawsuits against C.R. Bard — Multi-District Litigation (MDL No. 2641) — IN RE: Bard IVC Filters Products Liability Litigation.
The plaintiff is represented by Ben C. Martin of The Law Offices of Ben C. Martin in Dallas, Texas. He is a trial attorney who serves on the plaintiffs’ steering committee of the Bard IVC Filter MDL.
Editor’s note: For more information about IVC Filter lawsuits and your legal rights, please contact The Law Offices of Ben C. Martin.