Houston-based The Lanier Law Firm secured a $39 million verdict on behalf of a mesothelioma patient who is the first known person to claim in a lawsuit that the medical procedure talc pleurodesis led to his deadly cancer.
A jury in Massachusetts returned its verdict Friday, finding United Minerals and Properties, doing business as Cimbar Performance Minerals, misrepresented the safety of its Elite Talc 2000 for pharmaceutical and cosmetic uses and that Cimbar’s negligence was a substantial contributing factor to Bryce Zundel’s mesothelioma.
Bryce Zundel and his wife Diane Zundel were pleased with the verdict, said Mark Linder, one of the Zundels’ lawyers with The Lanier Law Firm.
“They really hope that Mr. Zundel is the last case,” Linder said in an interview with The Texas Lawbook. “Our theory was not that the hospitals or doctor did anything wrong; it was that they were deprived of information just like Mr. Zundel was.”
Zundel, now 64 of Utah, developed mesothelioma in 2021, seven years after undergoing a talc pleurodesis to prevent further recurrence of a collapsed lung. During the 2014 procedure, a product called Sterile Talc Powder that was made with Cimbar’s Elite Talc 2000 was administered around Zundel’s left lung. Zundel was diagnosed in 2021 with mesothelioma in the same tissue around his left lung. Cimbar discontinued its line of Elite Talc products in 2019, Linder said.
Zundel and his wife filed their lawsuit in 2022 against Cimbar and four others: Amerilure, Boston Medical Products, Lymol Medical Corp and Sciarra Laboratories. Boston Medical Products was dismissed from the suit; the others reached confidential settlements with the Zundels, Linder said.
Cimbar’s trial lawyers did not respond to a request for comment. Linder said the company’s lawyers, of Husch Blackwell, argued at trial that the latency period was too short for the medical procedure to have been the cause of Zundel’s mesothelioma and contended he is the only person to claim talc pleurodesis caused mesothelioma.
Linder said Zundel’s is the first lawsuit he’s aware of to claim the medical procedure exposed a person to asbestos, the cancer-causing contaminant in talc. But he pushed back on Cimbar’s argument that it hasn’t happened to anyone before.
“There’s really just not adequate data to even say that,” Linder said.
The plaintiffs called David Madigan, a statistician and the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Northeastern University in Boston, as a rebuttal witness. Madigan told jurors that too few people have been studied to draw a conclusion about the outcomes for patients with collapsed lungs who received talc pleurodesis. Most patients who undergo the procedure already have cancer and the procedure is intended to ease their pain, Linder said.
Zundel was the first of the plaintiffs’ 10 witnesses to testify. Linder said the lawyers chose to put him on the stand first to introduce him to the jury and to lay a foundation for the “very science based” testimony that would take up much of the 18-day trial (the judge released the jury in the early afternoon most days to attend to other matters, Linder added).
Critical plaintiffs’ testimony came from two expert witnesses and a Cimbar representative who was called as an adverse witness, Linder said.
Dr. William Longo, CEO of Materials Analytical Services in Georgia, testified that some testing methods won’t detect the presence of asbestos but that there are more sensitive testing methods available, Linder said.
The testimony of Arnold Brody, professor emeritus at Tulane University School of Medicine’s pathology and laboratory medicine department, addressed Zundel’s shorter-than-most latency between the 2014 procedure and his 2021 diagnosis, Linder said. Brody told jurors that mesothelioma can be produced more quickly when the asbestos is put directly on the target cells, Linder said.
The plaintiff lawyers were able to show during the corporate representative’s testimony inaccuracies in Cimbar’s product literature, Linder said.
“They knew that asbestos in talc was a risk from the very moment that they became involved in the talc industry,” Linder said. “And it just so happens that the way they ended up developing a testing program and pursuing a testing program was such that they were employing methods that were never going to find the asbestos and therefore passing this material off as asbestos-free despite their knowledge that it was associated with mesothelioma and that asbestos in talc has been reported elsewhere in the talc industry for decades.”
Cimbar was represented by Brad DeJardin, Erin Carpenter and Mallarie Simonds of Husch Blackwell.
The Zundels were also represented by Darron Berquist and Manny Cabrera of The Lanier Law Firm, Danny Kraft of Meirowitz and Wasserberg and Christopher Duffy of Duffy Law.
The case number is 2281-CV-02145 in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.