Diana Novak Jones
CHICAGO (Reuters) – A Chicago jury on Thursday rejected an Illinois woman’s claim that the now-discontinued heartburn drug Zantac caused her colon cancer. It was the first of thousands of lawsuits making similar claims.
A jury in Illinois’ Cook County Circuit Court says the plaintiff, 89-year-old Illinois resident Angela Valadez, has not proven that her colon cancer was at least partially caused by her use of Zantac. Agreed with the claims of the companies GSK and Boehringer Ingelheim.
Valadez claimed that her cancer was caused by taking the over-the-counter drug Zantac and its generic versions from 1995 to 2014. The lawsuit over the drug alleges that its active ingredient, ranitidine, can turn into a carcinogen under certain conditions. NDMA.
Valadez’s lawyers had asked the jury to award her $640 million in damages for her suffering. The judge denied Valadez’s request for punitive damages during the trial, his lawyer said.
Mikal Watts, one of Valadez’s lawyers, said he respects the jury’s verdict but is confident the companies will be held accountable in future Zantac trials. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” he said.
GSK and Boehringer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
UK-based GSK (whose predecessor developed the drug and later sold the brand to another company) and German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, which sold the drug from 2006 to 2017. , became the sole defendant in the trial after the other companies settled.
Watts argued in the case, which began May 2, that the companies knew ranitidine would turn into NDMA as it aged or was exposed to extreme temperatures, but that it was not handled properly by carriers, distributors and outlets. He said that he had not confirmed that it had been done.
Lawyers for GSK and Boehringer countered that Zantac has repeatedly been proven safe and effective and that no scientific or medical studies have linked Zantac to cancer.
Lawyers for both companies also argued at trial that there was no evidence to support Valadez’s claim that she had been taking Zantac for 18 years and that she had many risk factors that increased her chances of developing colon cancer.
The jury found that Valadez proved she had been taking Zantac, but not that it caused her cancer.
First approved in 1983, Zantac became the world’s best-selling drug in 1988, becoming one of the first drugs to surpass $1 billion in annual sales.
In 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration asked drug companies to remove Zantac and its generic versions from the market after NDMA was detected in drug samples. Thousands of lawsuits began piling up in federal and state courts.
In 2022, the defense won a major victory when a judge dismissed roughly 50,000 claims that were being centrally tried in federal court in Florida. The judge concluded that the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses’ opinions that Zantac could cause cancer were not supported by sound science.
Some of the plaintiffs in these cases have appealed the ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Atlanta, Georgia.
As Delaware state court judges consider the fate of the bulk of the remaining cases, about 72,000, drug companies have similarly argued that the plaintiffs’ expert testimony should be suppressed. There is.
Several other lawsuits have already been settled, including several individual lawsuits pending trial and about 4,000 lawsuits in state courts outside of Delaware against Sanofi, which has held the rights to sell Zantac over-the-counter since 2017. ing.
Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that Pfizer had reached a deal to pay up to $250 million to settle more than 10,000 Zantac lawsuits.
Sanofi now sells an improved version of the heartburn drug, Zantac 360, which also contains famotidine as its active ingredient.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones in Chicago and Brendan Pearson in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Alexia Garamfalvy)
