The pharmaceutical company that manufactured the popular heartburn medication Zantac has settled with two California plaintiffs who brought lawsuits alleging the active ingredient in Zantac, ranitidine, caused their cancers.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) said in a Sept. 19 statement that it had reached confidential settlement agreements with John Russell, who alleged that Zantac caused his bladder cancer, and with Annette Hughes, whose lawsuit against GSK involved her colorectal cancer. Opening statements in the cases had been set for Oct. 7 in Alameda County Superior Court.
GSK did not acknowledge any liability in either of the two settlements, according to a company statement provided to the Southern California Record, and the parties are now set to dismiss the lawsuits. But GSK continues to stand by the science underpinning the safety of the heartburn medication
“Since 2019, following the 16 epidemiological studies looking at human data regarding the use of ranitidine, the scientific consensus is that there is no consistent or reliable evidence that ranitidine increases the risk of any cancer,” the company said in its statement. “GSK will continue to vigorously defend itself and manage this litigation in the best interests of the company and shareholders.”
The plaintiffs’ lawsuits, however, remain pending against a GSK co-defendant that also sold Zantac, Boehringer Ingelheim. That legal proceeding will be the first Zantac trial to take place in California, according to the Los Angeles-based Wisner Baum law firm, which is representing the plaintiffs with the Moore Law Group.
“Plaintiffs John Russell and Annette Hughes have settled their claims, and we are pleased that defendant GlaxoSmithKline agreed to settle each of their cases and finally bring closure to Mr. Russell and Ms. Hughes,” the two plaintiffs’ attorneys, R. Brent Wisner and Jennifer A. Moore, said in a prepared statement. “We are still proceeding to trial against Boehringer Ingelheim for these bellwether clients. …”
In the Alameda County litigation, Judge Noel Wise recently denied Boehringer Ingelheim’s bid to dismiss plaintiff Russell’s claim for punitive damages.
Nationwide, the Zantac state lawsuits, which are concentrated in California, Delaware, Illinois and Pennsylvania, have been a mixed bag for plaintiffs’ attorneys. On Sept. 18, a mistrial was declared in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago in another Zantac case against Boehringer Ingelheim.
Some of the science behind claims that ranitidine causes certain types of cancer grew out of research conducted by the private laboratory testing company Valisure, which said that ranitidine can degrade into a compound called N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA). This compound is a likely human carcinogen at certain concentrations, Valisure concluded.
Valisure found that ranitidine can degrade into NDMA concentrations that are thousands of times above the allowable limit that the federal Food and Drug Administration allows for consumer products. But judges, pharmaceutical companies and others dispute those claims, arguing that the temperature conditions used by Valisure were not comparable to conditions involved with the normal use of the drug.
In 2022, a Florida judge, who was overseeing federal multidistrict litigation about Zantac, dismissed the scientific evidence against Zantac brought by plaintiffs’ attorneys in an opinion that exceeded 300 pages. But a Delaware Superior Court judge ruled earlier this year that plaintiffs’ experts could testify about their conclusions about the relationship between ranitidine and cancer.
The FDA ordered the removal of Zantac from the market in 2020 as a result of allegations of cancer risks.