In Re SFBC International, Inc. Securities & Derivative Litigation

495 F. Supp. 2d 477, 2007 WL 2127213
CourtDistrict Court, D. New Jersey
DecidedJuly 25, 2007
DocketMDL No. 1777 (SRC), Civil Action No. 06-165 (SRC)
StatusPublished
Cited by5 cases

This text of 495 F. Supp. 2d 477 (In Re SFBC International, Inc. Securities & Derivative Litigation) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, D. New Jersey primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
In Re SFBC International, Inc. Securities & Derivative Litigation, 495 F. Supp. 2d 477, 2007 WL 2127213 (D.N.J. 2007).

Opinion

AMENDED OPINION

CHESLER, District Judge.

This matter comes before the Court upon the motion filed by Defendants Jack Levine, Gregory B. Holmes, David Natan, Marc LeBel, E. Cooper Shamblen, David Lucking, Arnold Golieb, Lewis Elias and Leonard I. Weinstein to dismiss the Verified Consolidated Derivated Complaint (“Complaint”) pursuant to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) and 23.1 [docket item # 94], Defendant SFBC International, Inc., now known as PharmaNet Development Group, Inc., joins in the individual Defendants’ motion to dismiss [docket item # 98]. (Hereinafter, the individual Defendants and PharmaNet Development Group, Inc. will be referred to collectively as “Defendants.”) The Court has considered the parties’ submissions in support of and in opposition to this motion, and, pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 78, rules on the motion based on the papers submitted. For the reasons that follow, the Court denies Defendants’ motion to dismiss.

I. Background

This shareholder derivative suit arises from the alleged mismanagement of SFBC International, Inc., now known as Phar-maNet Development Group, Inc. (“PDG”), a company engaged in the business of providing clinical testing, development and consulting services to pharmaceutical and medical device companies. (For simplicity, this Opinion will refer to the subject company as “PDG”.) The breach of fiduciary duty and mismanagement claims asserted in this lawsuit concern a broad range of alleged misconduct, from improper person *480 nel choices to the failure to rectify unethical clinical testing practices and unsafe conditions at the company’s flagship Miami testing facility. The following synopsis of the facts is drawn from the allegations of the Complaint, and the Court assumes their truth for the purpose of this motion only.

According to the Complaint, PDG provides a range of early and late stage clinical drug development services to branded pharmaceutical, biotechnology, generic drug and medical device companies worldwide. During the period at issue in this lawsuit, that is, August 2003 to January 2006, PDG operated clinical trial facilities in Miami and Fort Myers in Florida and Quebec City and Montreal in Canada. The company was headquartered in Miami, with corporate offices located in the same building as the Miami testing facility.

During the relevant period, PDG engaged in a strategy of growth and expansion, motivating it to secure lucrative contracts by assuring pharmaceutical companies that it could quickly enlist study participants and process clinical trials at its large Miami facility. Plaintiffs charge that to deliver these promised services, PDG violated proper and ethical clinical practices and procedures, putting the safety of the human participants in the studies at risk and providing the client companies with inaccurate or falsified reports about the products being tested. Many test participants were uneducated, low-income U.S. citizens or immigrants, who were baited with payment plans that were designed to assure that they would not drop out of a trial or report adverse reactions. For example, the Complaint states that participants were paid only $66 per day for the first nine days of testing, but offered payment increases of 500% per day for the last three days of a test. PDG employees provided these participants with inadequate disclosures about the dangers of the trials in which they were enrolling. Immigrant participants were threatened with deportation if they did not cooperate with the company’s scheme to un-derreport negative experiences during the trials. Further detailing how the participants’ health was put at risk, the Complaint recounts an example of a Haitian immigrant with active tuberculosis being permitted to participate in a study at the Montreal facility. Numerous other people housed at the Montreal facility tested positive for latent tuberculosis, including the Haitian immigrant’s roommate at the facility, a Kuwaiti immigrant whose demands to be moved to another room were ignored for days.

In addition to inducing participants to falsify or suppress information, those running the PDG clinical trials also contaminated test results by allowing participants to overlap tests. Participants were permitted to participate in back-to-back tests, without abiding by the minimum waiting requirements set by the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). No effort was made to determine whether participants were simultaneously involved in other trials conducted by other clinics. The Complaint charges that PDG’s directors took no action to remedy these egregious violations.

The Complaint further charges that, to conceal these unethical and/or illegal practices, PDG worked with two Institutional Review Boards (“IRBs”) 1 which had conflicts of interest preventing them from conducting unbiased reviews of the clinical trials. One of them, Southern IRB, was *481 owned by the wife of defendant Cooper Shamblen, vice president of clinical operations. PDG also used an IRB called Lee Coast, which Plaintiffs allege shared offices with PDG’s Fort Myers’s subsidiary. Plaintiffs allege that Lee Coast employees were paid directly by PDG’s accounting office and that Lee Coast did not maintain its own books and records.

The FDA detected problems with PDG’s clinical practices. PDG received at lest seven Form 483 citations from the FDA during the relevant period. 2 The FDA conducted inspections of the testing facilities and identified various improper practices, including that PDG employees were giving test subjects additional medication, such as Ibuprofen and skin cream, without informing the drug manufacturer that sponsored the tests; that the company changed test results to please a client; and that persons with a certain condition which should have excluded them from a study were nonetheless allowed to participate.

The Complaint also describes grossly substandard conditions at the Miami testing facility, which accounted for over 60% of PDG’s clinical trial facilities and over 30% of its profits. Though promoted by the company as “state of the art,” the facility is described by the Complaint as a “converted Holiday Inn.” Plaintiffs charge that the facility was expanded without the proper permits and in violation of building codes, rendering the structure unsafe. It was crammed with more than double the beds permitted by law and maintained in an unsanitary condition. The Miami Dade Building Department cited the facility for unsafe conditions over 80 times, over six years, dating back to October 1999. Ultimately, the Building Department ordered the Miami facility demolished, which cost PDG over $26 million, or 20% of its revenues.

A number of other instances of misconduct left unaddressed by the directors are cited in the Complaint.

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Bluebook (online)
495 F. Supp. 2d 477, 2007 WL 2127213, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/in-re-sfbc-international-inc-securities-derivative-litigation-njd-2007.