A Santa Clara County jury ordered Pfizer on Monday to pay $38 million to a Bay Area research group for stealing trade secrets to develop a pain relief drug.

The jurors found the drug secrets were stolen from the San Bruno-based Ischemia Research and Education Foundation. The Bextra pain relief medication was in the end recalled.

Pfizer stole the data through Ping Hsu, a statistician at the foundation hired from San Bruno, California-based IREF. Pat Harris, an IREF attorney, said that Pfizer and Hsu could also face punitive damages which could amount to almost $16 million because they acted with malice, destroying evidence when confronted about the data theft. The punitive damage amount is to be determined in the coming month by Santa Clara Superior Court Judge Gregory Ward. 

Bextra received the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration on November, 2001, and was available until 2005, when it was taken off from the market due to concerns that it boosted the risk of heart attack and stroke. Pfizer settled class actions over the pain relief medication and a Celebrex, a similar drug, for $894 million in October.

"This verdict was extremely satisfying to me, because I had felt that Pfizer had stolen the information we had gathered in order to manipulate it to keep their drug Bextra on the market," said Dr. Dennis Mangano, founder of the San Jose, Calif.-based nonprofit medical research firm.
 
Southern California attorney Mark Geragos, one of Mangano's attorneys, classified Pfizer's conduct as "despicable'' and added that the jury’s verdict would save the foundation's research work.