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On Thursday, a Missouri jury ordered Johnson & Johnson (J&J), a pharmaceutical company to pay a record $4.69 billion to 22 women who alleged the company's talc-based products, involving its baby powder, comprise asbestos and caused them to develop ovarian cancer.

The company is battling some 9,000 talc cases. It has denied both that its talc products cause cancer and that they ever contained asbestos. It says decades of studies show its talc to be harmless and has with success overturned previous talc verdicts on technical legal grounds.

According to an online broadcast of the trial by Courtroom View Network, the massive verdict on Thursday, which was handed down in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis, comprised of $550 million in compensatory damages and $4.14 billion in punitive damages.

J&J in a statement called the trial "fundamentally unfair" and said it would appeal the judgment.

The jury's judgment followed more than five weeks of evidence by nearly a dozen experts on both sides.

The women and their families said the decades-long use of Baby Powder and other cosmetic talc products caused their diseases. They assert the company knew its talc was contaminated with asbestos since at least the 1970s merely failing to warn consumers regarding the hazards.

"Johnson & Johnson is deeply disappointed by the verdict, which was the product of a fundamentally unfair process," the company said in a statement. The company said it remained confident that its products do not contain asbestos or cause cancer.

"Every verdict against Johnson & Johnson in this court that has gone through the appeals process has been reversed and the multiple errors present in this trial were worse than those in the prior trials which have been reversed," J&J added, saying that it would pursue all available appellate remedies.

Of the 22 women in the St. Louis trial, 17 were from outside Missouri, a state by and large regarded as friendly towards plaintiffs.

The attorney for the women Mark Lanier, in a statement, said following the verdict called on J&J to pull its talc products from the market "before causing further anguish, harm, and death from a terrible disease."

"If J&J insists on continuing to sell talc, they should mark it with a serious warning,” Lanier said.

The United States Food and Drug Administration accredited a survey of various talc samples from 2009 to 2010, including of J&J's Baby Powder. The agency said no asbestos was found in any of the talc samples.

By Sowmya Sangam