Great Lakes Wire

Barry Cadden, the former owner of New England Compounding Center (NECC) in Framingham, Massachusetts, has been sentenced to 10-15 years' incarceration for his role in the deadly 2012 nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak. The sentencing was announced by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel in the 44th Circuit Court in Livingston County. Cadden had previously pled no contest to 11 counts of involuntary manslaughter in March.

The 2012 outbreak resulted in 64 deaths, with 11 resulting from injection treatments at the Michigan Pain Specialists Clinic (MPS) in Livingston County. Patients at this clinic were given epidural injections of the steroid methylprednisolone, which was compounded and produced at Cadden’s NECC and shipped to MPS. Eleven individuals died as a result of being injected with the contaminated drug.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel stated, “We all depend on safe medications. Whether it’s a child needing antibiotics, a parent receiving life-saving treatment, or a grandmother in desperate need of pain relief, every patient deserves to know their medications will help them, not kill them." She added that the families of these victims will forever bear the weight of Mr. Cadden’s greed and disregard for basic standards that caused this horrific tragedy.

Cadden had disregarded sterility procedures in compounding sterile medications and ran his business unsafely. He endorsed laboratory directives where cleaning records and scientific testing results were regularly forged and fabricated. The Department of Attorney General began investigating Cadden in 2013 and charged him with 11 counts of Second-Degree Murder in 2018. In 2017, he was found guilty on 57 criminal charges by a federal court and was sentenced to 14.5 years’ incarceration. His current sentence will be served concurrently with the federal sentence.