David Frederick. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

A federal appeals court has revived more than 750 lawsuits filed over four diabetes drugs after finding that a San Diego judge misapplied a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court opinion relating to federal pre-emption.

In a Dec. 6 unpublished memorandum, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit punted on a key issue in the case: whether the manufacturers of the drugs, under the Supreme Court's 2009 holding in Wyeth v. Levine, could provide “clear evidence” that the Food and Drug Administration would “not have approved” changes to the drugs' labeling that plaintiffs alleged were necessary to warn of links to pancreatic cancer.

Kannon Shanmugam, a Washington, D.C., partner at Williams & Connolly who argued for the drug manufacturers, had insisted the makers of the drugs had done extensive research to disprove such a link.