A Los Angeles jury awarded $40 million to two women who claimed talcum powder manufactured by Johnson & Johnson caused them ovarian cancer.

The healthcare giant immediately announced its intention to appeal the liability verdict and compensatory damages.

The ruling represents the latest development in a long-running legal battle over allegations that talc in Johnson’s Shower to Shower baby powder and body powder is linked to ovarian cancer and mesothelioma, a cancer that affects the lungs and other organs. Johnson & Johnson (J&J) stopped selling powders made with talcum powder worldwide in 2023.

Last October, another California jury ordered J&J to pay $966 million to the family of a woman who died of mesothelioma, alleging that her cancer developed due to asbestos contamination in the baby powder she used.

In the latest case, the jury awarded $18 million to Monica Kent and $22 million to Deborah Schultz and her husband. “All they did was be loyal to Johnson & Johnson as customers for just 50 years,” said their lawyer, Daniel Robinson, of the Robinson Calcagnie law firm in Newport Beach, California. “That loyalty was one-sided.”

Erik Haas, J&J’s global vice president of litigation, said in a statement that the company had won “16 of the 17 ovarian cancer cases it had previously tried” and hoped to do so again after appealing Friday’s verdict.

Haas called the jury’s conclusions “irreconcilable with decades of independent scientific evaluations confirming that talc is safe, does not contain asbestos and does not cause cancer.”

Johnson & Johnson replaced baby powder sold in most of North America with cornstarch in 2020 after sales declined.

In April, a U.S. bankruptcy court judge rejected J&J’s plan to pay $9 billion to settle ovarian and other gynecologic cancer lawsuits based on talc-related products.