Attorneys representing patients who were harmed by a defective metal-on-metal hip from a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson have deposed several executives from the medical products giant in an attempt to gather more information about the device and the company's August 2010 recall. Among those deposed is a top official with J&J who claimed in an interview that the company phased out the device, the ASR SL Acetabular artificial hip, five months before the recall purely for business reasons.

But by then, experts had been noting for months that the ASR hips tended to break down within just a few years of implantation. The ball joint had the tendency to scrape against the cup portion of the hip, flaking off metal shavings that would embed themselves in the surrounding body tissue. Thousands of patients have experienced pain, swelling and difficult walking as a result, with most such patients having to undergo painful revision surgery to remove the defective hip and replace it with a new one.

The thousands of patients who have filed lawsuits against J&J and DePuy Orthopaedics, the unit that designed and manufactured the hips, will no doubt be interested to hear what the J&J executives say at their depositions, which are scheduled for February and March. Those deposed include a senior engineering fellow, a director of strategic outcomes and the vice president of worldwide clinical affairs. It was the latter executive who claimed in March 2011 that J&J's decision to stop marketing the ASR was due to poor sales, not reports of a possible defect.

Source: Mass Device, "More J&J execs deposed in DePuy lawsuit," Jan. 18, 2012