Juno to Settle Class-Action Suit Over Clinical Trial Deaths

More than a year after shutting down its CAR-T trial after subjects died, Juno Therapeutics agreed to pay $24 million to investors who claimed they were not properly informed.

In their 2016 class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the investors claimed the company deliberately delayed notifying shareholders until about a month after the first death, by which time two more patients had died.

Juno concluded a secondary drug was to blame for the deaths and resumed the trial after removing it. Two more patients died in November, leading the FDA to suspend the trial. The company didn’t finally pull the drug on the trial until March 2017.