GSK has agreed to pay up to $2.2 billion to settle the majority of lawsuits in US state courts alleging that the discontinued version of the heartburn drug Zantac caused cancer. This settlement covers about 80,000 cases, or 93% of the cases pending against the British drugmaker in state courts across the country. Additionally, GSK will pay $70 million to settle a related whistleblower lawsuit filed by a Connecticut laboratory. The company did not admit wrongdoing as part of the deal, citing that there was no consistent or reliable evidence that the drug’s active ingredient, ranitidine, increased the risk of cancer, but they decided to settle to avoid the risk of continued litigation.
The lead attorneys for the plaintiffs, Jennifer Moore and R. Brent Wisner, expressed their satisfaction with the settlement, stating that they were “thrilled” with the deal. Zantac was first approved by US regulators in 1983 and became the best-selling medicine in the world in 1988, reaching over $1 billion in annual sales. The drug was sold by various pharmaceutical companies, including GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Boehringer Ingelheim. Lawsuits against these companies began to accumulate in both state and federal courts after the FDA requested manufacturers to remove Zantac from the market in 2020 due to concerns that ranitidine could degrade into NDMA, a carcinogen, over time or when exposed to heat.
Pfizer has settled most of the Zantac cases against it in state court, as indicated in its recent financial statement, while Sanofi announced a settlement of approximately 4,000 cases in April. Boehringer Ingelheim has not announced any major settlements but is currently facing a trial over the drug in Oakland, California, state court. The company has denied any wrongdoing and is being pursued by plaintiffs for exposing millions of people to a known carcinogen for over a decade. A majority of the remaining state court cases are in Delaware, where a judge allowed plaintiffs to present expert testimony linking Zantac to cancer. The drug companies are appealing this ruling to the Delaware Supreme Court.
In 2022, a Florida federal court judge ruled that about 50,000 cases centralized there could not proceed due to unreliable expert testimony presented by the plaintiffs. Approximately 14,000 of those cases are being appealed and are not included in the recent settlement. It is important to note that a drug currently sold under the name Zantac 360 uses a different active ingredient and does not contain ranitidine. Despite the settlement reached by GSK, Pfizer, and Sanofi, the legal battles surrounding Zantac and its alleged link to cancer are far from over, with ongoing appeals, trials, and lawsuits continuing in various state courts across the country.
