&w=1024&resize=1024,0&ssl=1 "GSK Agrees to Settle Nearly 80,000 Zantac Lawsuits for Up to .2 Billion | world news")
GSK has agreed to pay up to $2.2 billion to resolve most lawsuits in U.S. state courts alleging that a discontinued version of the heartburn drug Zantac caused cancer, the company announced Wednesday.
The settlement with 10 plaintiffs' law firms resolves about 80,000 cases, or 93 percent of the cases pending against the British drugmaker in state courts across the country, the agency said. GSK also said it would pay $70 million to settle a related whistleblower lawsuit filed by a Connecticut laboratory.
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GSK did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, saying in a statement that there is “no consistent or reliable evidence” that ranitidine, the drug’s active ingredient, increases the risk of cancer. However, it said the agreements are in the company's long-term interests to avoid the risk of continued litigation.
Jennifer Moore and R. Brent Wiesner, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a joint statement that they were “thrilled” with the settlement.
First approved by US regulators in 1983, Zantac became the best-selling drug in the world in 1988 and one of the first to surpass $1 billion in annual sales. Pharmaceutical companies GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim have sold the drug at various times.
Lawsuits against the companies began piling up in state and federal courts in 2020 after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration asked manufacturers to pull Zantac from the market. The agency cited concerns that ranitidine could turn into NDMA, a carcinogen, over time or when exposed to heat.
Pfizer agreed to settle most of Zantac's lawsuits against it in state courts, and Sanofi announced in April that it was resolving about 4,000 lawsuits, according to its most recent financial statement.
Boehringer Ingelheim has not announced a major settlement, but is currently facing a drug trial in state court in Oakland, California. The company denied any wrongdoing.
“We continue to file claims against Boehringer Ingelheim for unfairly exposing millions of people to known carcinogens for more than a decade,” Moore and Wisner said.
Most of the remaining state court lawsuits are in Delaware, where a judge in June allowed plaintiffs to present important expert testimony about Zantac cancer. The pharmaceutical companies wanted to keep out testimony that was not based on solid scientific evidence, which would have ended the lawsuits, and are appealing the judge's ruling to the Delaware Supreme Court.
The companies won a major victory in 2022 when a federal court judge in Florida ruled that nearly 50,000 lawsuits centered there could not proceed because testimony from plaintiffs' experts was not supported by reliable science. About 14,000 of those cases are being appealed and were not part of Wednesday's settlement.
A medication currently sold as Zantac 360 uses a different active ingredient and does not contain ranitidine.
(Only the title and image for this report may have been reworked by the Business Standards team; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a distributed feed.)
