Two patients who were injured by Medtronic’s controversial Infuse bone graft product will receive a combined $8.45 million in settlements with the University of California Los Angeles, where a doctor with financial ties to the company used the product on them.
Patients Ralph Weiss and Jerome Lew alleged that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medtronic consulting, grants and royalty payments to UCLA surgeon Jeffrey Wang created conflicts of interest that led to risky treatments about which they were not informed. They said they were not told that they were receiving Infuse or that it was being inserted into mechanical devices with which it had never been tested for safety.
Patients Ralph Weiss and Jerome Lew alleged that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medtronic consulting, grants and royalty payments to UCLA surgeon Jeffrey Wang created conflicts of interest that led to risky treatments about which they were not informed. They said they were not told that they were receiving Infuse or that it was being inserted into mechanical devices with which it had never been tested for safety.