Bard PowerPort Lawsuit
(Implanted Port Catheter)

The Bard PowerPort is an implanted port catheter—a medical device surgically placed under the skin to provide long-term vascular access for chemotherapy, IV medications, and blood draws. The device consists of a port (reservoir) placed in the chest and a catheter tube that runs into a large vein near the heart.

Plaintiffs allege that Bard's PowerPort devices are defectively designed. The catheters use a polyurethane material called "Chronoflex" containing barium sulfate (to make the device visible on X-rays). Over time, the barium sulfate particles separate from the catheter surface, weakening the material and creating sites prone to fracture.

When these catheters fracture, fragments can migrate through the bloodstream to the heart or lungs, requiring emergency surgery to remove. The lawsuits also allege the surface degradation makes the catheters more susceptible to bacterial colonization, leading to serious bloodstream infections.

These devices reached the market through the FDA's 510(k) pathway, which clears a device if it is substantially equivalent to one already on sale, without the clinical trials required for higher-risk approvals. Plaintiffs argue that pathway allowed design problems to persist without the scrutiny a genuinely new device would face. Bard has cleared more than a dozen PowerPort variants this way since 2006.

The corporate history matters for who is on the hook. C.R. Bard designed and sold the PowerPort line, and Becton, Dickinson and Company acquired Bard in December 2017 and is named as the parent. Both are defendants in the MDL, which is why the first bellwether is captioned Cook v. Becton, Dickinson.

The first bellwether, Cook v. Becton, Dickinson, was an infection case, and it set the tone for how these claims may play out. Robert Cook, a Minnesota colorectal-cancer patient, was hospitalized for six days and had chemotherapy delayed about two weeks after his PowerPort became infected. In opening statements on April 21, 2026, plaintiff's counsel told jurors that Bard had known for decades that its devices were prone to infection yet shelved safer technologies, including antimicrobial coatings and smoother catheter materials, developed as early as 2005. Cook's expert, interventional radiologist Dr. Darren Hurst, testified that his hospital abandoned Bard products in 2014.

Heading into trial, Judge Campbell had denied nearly all of Bard's summary-judgment motion on March 5, 2026, which was a significant plaintiff win. In early May 2026 the jury returned a defense verdict on the claims it decided, clearing Bard and Becton Dickinson on failure to warn, failure to instruct, and consumer fraud, and hung on the central design-defect claim, leaving it unresolved. Plaintiff has since moved for a new trial or judgment as a matter of law, arguing faulty jury instructions and that the jury was pressured by a court-ordered deadline. The motion, filed June 3, 2026 and fully briefed on July 15, remained undecided as of September 30, 2026. The first plaintiff verdict in the litigation came later, in the second bellwether, Divelbliss, on September 4, 2026 ($40 million).

The early read is narrow but useful for intake: an infection theory may be harder for plaintiffs than a fracture or migration theory. Divelbliss, a fracture case, tested that and produced the first plaintiff verdict. The next trial, Lattanzio, beginning October 13, 2026, returns to an infection claim.

The bellwether slate was cut from six cases to five. In CMO 48, issued May 19, 2026, Judge Campbell declined to substitute an alternate after the second bellwether plaintiff, Wanda Miller, died in February 2026 and her family chose not to continue.

His reasoning is worth reading if you are evaluating inventory. Fracture claims represent only about 12% of the cases in this MDL, so keeping two of six fracture bellwethers would have over-weighted that injury relative to the docket. He also set out the fallback for cases that do not resolve: under CMO 48, cases not resolved by settlement after the bellwethers are to be transferred or remanded to their home districts for resolution. That backstop matters, because it means a claimant's own home district may ultimately try the case rather than the MDL court in Arizona.

This is one of the most useful facts for a firm weighing whether to take these cases, and almost no competitor page states it. Fracture is the headline injury, but it is not the common one. Per Judge Campbell in CMO 48, fracture claims are only about 12% of the MDL. Infection and thrombosis claims make up the large majority of the inventory.

That distribution shapes the bellwether program, the order in which the injuries are tested at trial, and the kind of case that is most numerous in the docket. An intake process built only around dramatic catheter-fracture-and-migration stories will misjudge what most of the actual claims look like. The first two bellwethers illustrate the split directly: Cook was an infection case that ended in a defense verdict, and Divelbliss was the first fracture case and produced the first plaintiff verdict.

The five bellwethers deliberately span three catheter materials, because the design-defect theory is not identical across them. The materials are Chronoflex polyurethane, the silicone Groshong catheter, and silicone. Divelbliss, tried in August and September 2026, involved a silicone Groshong catheter placed in the subclavian vein. Lattanzio, set for trial on October 13, 2026, involves a PowerPort with a silicone catheter.

Testing more than one material is how the program probes whether the alleged defect is specific to the barium-sulfate-loaded polyurethane or extends to the silicone lines as well. For a claimant, the material of the specific device implanted can matter, and it is recorded in the surgical and device records rather than something a patient would usually know from memory.

Beyond the federal MDL, Bard port catheter cases are also consolidated in New Jersey state court. The New Jersey Multicounty Litigation (MCL) is centralized in Bergen County before Judge Gregg Padovano and was designated on October 15, 2024. It runs on its own schedule and its own rulings, separate from the Arizona MDL.

The state track can matter for claimants whose cases are filed in or belong in New Jersey, and firms weighing inventory should decide explicitly whether they want the state track in addition to the federal MDL, because the two move independently. We have not been able to verify a current case count for the New Jersey MCL from a primary source, so we do not state one.

The docket is growing fast. Pending federal actions rose by 406 between the September and October 2026 reports, from 3,734 to 4,140. Because the September report repeated August's figures exactly, that jump likely reflects about two months of filings, roughly 200 a month (see the case-growth chart above). That pace makes MDL-3081 one of the fastest-growing device MDLs of its size on the federal docket.

Filing velocity is not the same as case strength. The first bellwether was a defense verdict on the decided claims, so rapid growth should be read as a measure of how many claimants are coming forward, not as a prediction of outcome. It is, however, the reason this litigation sits at the center of device-MDL attention in 2026, and it is why the Divelbliss fracture verdict in September, the first plaintiff verdict in the MDL, is so significant.

The complaints plead several distinct theories, and the Cook and Divelbliss verdicts are the first real data points on how they fare in front of a jury. Understanding which claim is which explains why the next trial, Lattanzio, matters so much.

Design defect is the central claim: that the catheter is unreasonably dangerous as designed because the barium sulfate is alleged to degrade and weaken the material. This is the claim the Cook jury hung on. In the second bellwether, Divelbliss, a fracture case, the jury found for the plaintiff on design defect on September 4, 2026, the first time a jury in this MDL decided the claim. Failure to warn and failure to instruct allege that Bard did not adequately warn physicians of the risks or provide adequate directions for use; the Cook jury found for Bard on both, though the Divelbliss jury found failure to warn for the plaintiff. Consumer fraud and unlawful trade practices allege deceptive marketing; the Cook jury also found for Bard there.

Two procedural points frame all of this. First, plaintiffs cleared the general-causation gate earlier in the litigation, meaning the court accepted that the alleged mechanism can, in general, cause the injuries claimed; the fights now are over specific cases and specific defect theories. Second, Judge Campbell denied nearly all of Bard's summary-judgment motion on March 5, 2026, so the claims survived to be decided on their merits rather than being thrown out beforehand. The open question the bellwethers are answering is whether a jury will find the design itself defective, and the injury type in front of them (infection, fracture, or thrombosis) may change the answer.