New Jersey Jury Holds Wyeth Liable for Fen-Phen Lung Disease, Awards $3 Million

Gloria Stribling took the diet drug combination known as fen-phen in the mid-1990s. The fenfluramine half of that combination came from Wyeth's drug Pondimin. She used it from November 1995 to October 1996, a window of less than a year. About a decade later, doctors diagnosed her with primary pulmonary hypertension.

Primary pulmonary hypertension, or PPH, is a progressive narrowing of the arteries that carry blood through the lungs. The stiffened vessels force the heart to work harder and harder, and the disease is often fatal. There is no cure. The long stretch between Stribling's drug use and her diagnosis became a central question at trial: could a drug she had stopped taking years earlier still be blamed for a disease that surfaced so much later.

The case was tried in 2008 in the Superior Court of New Jersey, Bergen County. Gregory Bubalo, who is part of Becker Law Office's attorney roster, handled the scientific proof. According to the National Trial Lawyers, he presented the technical pharmacological evidence to the jury, explaining how Pondimin's active compound damaged the small blood vessels of the lungs and why a diagnosis years after exposure fit the known pattern of how PPH develops. Before opening statements, the court ruled that Stribling could not pursue punitive damages, so the jury weighed only her compensatory claim.

On October 22, 2008, the jury found that Pondimin was a cause of Stribling's disease. It assessed $3.0 million in total compensatory damages against Wyeth. That figure matches what the company reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission in its quarterly filing covering the verdict, where Wyeth identified the case by its docket number and described the result.

In that same SEC filing, Wyeth stated that it was "reviewing its post-trial options." No public record shows the $3.0 million compensatory award being reduced, remitted, or reversed after the jury returned it. The case is docketed as Stribling v. Wyeth Inc., No. BER-L-2352-07 MT, in Bergen County, New Jersey.