Ozempic lawsuit: where the Wegovy, Mounjaro and GLP-1 cases stand

Federal lawsuits over GLP-1 drugs are grouped into two multidistrict litigations, or MDLs, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. An MDL is not a trial. The Panel's orders send the cases to one judge for the shared work that comes before any trial, in the words of its December 15, 2025 order: “assigned to the Honorable Karen S. Marston for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings.”

MDL No. 3094 is the stomach and bowel case. The Panel created it on February 2, 2024, finding that “Each lawsuit contains substantially similar allegations about GLP-1 RAs (specifically, Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, Trulicity, and/or Mounjaro) and their alleged propensity to cause gastrointestinal injuries.” Among the questions it said every case shares is “whether defendants knew or should have known that their GLP-1 RA products can cause gastroparesis and other gastrointestinal injuries”.

The plaintiffs who asked for the MDL described the injuries more widely: “Movants seek to centralize actions involving plaintiffs who used any of these GLP-1 RA medications and in which plaintiffs suffered gastroparesis, ileus, intestinal obstruction or pseudo-obstruction, or other gastrointestinal injury.” That is their request, not the Panel's finding. The court's later orders, listed below, describe the injuries in their own words.

The drug makers dispute all of it. The court's own page for MDL No. 3094, read on September 25, 2026, says: “The Novo Nordisk defendants and Eli Lilly and Company deny these allegations.”

The 2024 order closes with the stomach and bowel cases “assigned to the Honorable Gene E. K. Pratter for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings.” By the time the Panel created the second MDL, on December 15, 2025, its order recorded that “Products liability litigation arising from the same drugs is pending in that district before Judge Karen S. Marston in MDL No. 3094.” Judge Karen S. Marston presides over both MDLs.

MDL No. 3163 is the vision case. It was created on December 15, 2025 for claims about non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION: “Plaintiffs allege that their use of Eli Lilly’s or Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 RA drugs (specifically, Ozempic, Wegovy, Saxenda, and Trulicity) caused them to suffer from non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION).” The Panel kept these cases apart from the stomach and bowel MDL, saying “we decline Eli Lilly’s suggestion that the NAION litigation be incorporated into MDL No. 3094”, and described the claims this way: “Plaintiffs bring substantially identical claims for failure to warn, design defect, and breach of warranties.”

The court's page for the vision MDL puts the two side by side: “This is the second MDL involving personal injury actions stemming from the use of GLP-1 RAs. The related MDL (MDL No. 3094) is also pending before Judge Marston. While the actions in this MDL allege that Plaintiffs suffer from NAION, the actions in MDL No. 3094 allege gastrointestinal injuries.”

The Panel's statistics report dated September 1, 2026 lists 4,022 actions pending in MDL No. 3094 and 216 pending in MDL No. 3163 as of September 1, 2026.

Those numbers count lawsuits on a court docket. They are not a count of people injured or of people who lost vision, and they say nothing about how any case will end.

Both MDLs started far smaller. The order of February 2, 2024 found that “This litigation consists of eighteen actions pending in eleven districts, as listed on Schedule A.” The order of December 15, 2025 found that “The litigation consists of 21 actions pending in three districts”.

The larger one is a registry study from Denmark, published in the International Journal of Retina and Vitreous on December 18, 2024. Its method, in its own words: “In a five-year longitudinal cohort study, we identified all persons with T2D in Denmark (n = 424,152) between 2018 and 2024.” It then compared two groups: “Patients were stratified according to exposure (n = 106,454) or non-exposure (n = 317,698) to once-weekly semaglutide”.

What it found: “During 1,915,120 person-years of observation, 218 persons developed NAION.” People taking semaglutide had the higher rate (“Semaglutide exposure was associated with a higher incidence rate (0·228 vs. 0·093 per 1000 person-years, p < 0·001)”), and exposure “independently predicted a higher risk of upcoming NAION (HR 2·19, 95% confidence interval 1·54 - 3·12)”. The paper's own tally: “Overall, 67 persons exposed to semaglutide developed NAION”.

The authors conclude that “use of once-weekly semaglutide independently more than doubled the risk of NAION”, and their declarations say: “Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.” It is an observational study, so what it reports is an association between the drug and NAION in the people it followed.

The second study pooled placebo-controlled trials of the manufacturer's own products. Published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology on April 28, 2026, it describes itself as a “Pooled safety evaluation of NAION incidence from completed phase II, III and IV randomised placebo-controlled trials that evaluated the six Novo Nordisk-manufactured GLP-1RA products (active ingredients: liraglutide and semaglutide)”. It was co-authored by employees of Novo Nordisk, the maker of the drugs it studied. Its conflict-of-interest statement reads: “DAK and MS are employees of Novo Nordisk and hold stock in Novo Nordisk.” It also reads: “CR is an employee of Novo Nordisk.” Two of the author affiliations it lists are “Novo Nordisk A/S, Søborg, Denmark.” and “Novo Nordisk India Pvt Ltd, Bangalore, India.”

Its size: “This pooled analysis included 96 829 participants (GLP-1RA-treated: n=64 917; placebo-treated: n=31 912) with 205 777 participant-years of observation”. Across those trials, “three confirmed NAION cases were identified in three GLP-1RA-treated participants and five confirmed cases were identified in four placebo-treated participants”. Its conclusion: “Data from randomised placebo-controlled trials with semaglutide and liraglutide do not show an increased incidence of NAION in participants receiving GLP-1RA treatment versus those receiving placebo”. That study, too, was co-authored by employees of Novo Nordisk.

So the two studies disagree. The Danish registry study found a higher rate among people taking semaglutide; the pooled trials of the manufacturer's own products, analysed by a team that included employees of Novo Nordisk, did not. The European regulator, weighing the evidence as a whole, still concluded that NAION is a very rare side effect of semaglutide. Anyone deciding what to make of that should know all three.

The order of July 2, 2026 in the vision MDL names seven brands. They are “sold under the brand names Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, Saxenda, Trulicity, Mounjaro, and Zepbound.” It says who makes them: “Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, and Saxenda are manufactured by the Novo Nordisk Defendants, and Trulicity, Mounjaro, and Zepbound are manufactured by the Eli Lilly Defendants.”

The 2024 order that created the stomach and bowel MDL named five of them. It described “Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus, each of which contains semaglutide as the active molecule and which are manufactured by the Novo Nordisk defendants”, and “Trulicity (dulaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide), which are manufactured by Eli Lilly and Company.”

One change to know about, from the court's order of July 2, 2026: “Earlier this year, the Novo Nordisk Defendants stopped marketing the semaglutide pill under the brand name “Rybelsus,” and instead, began marketing it as the pill form of Ozempic or Wegovy, depending on the dosage.” The current label for the pill covers both names.

Other medicines in the class are not named by brand in the orders quoted here. The court describes the stomach and bowel MDL's scope by drug class, as the checker above shows, and whether a particular medicine falls within it is a question for a lawyer.

Yes, but not one this page can give you. None of the MDL orders read for this page sets a filing deadline that applies to everyone. The time limit on a claim like this comes from the law of the state that governs it, and this page does not state those periods.

A deadline can run out while someone is still deciding what to do. Ask a licensed attorney in your state which deadline applies to you and when it started to run.