DOVER — A Delaware judge has allowed more than 70,000 lawsuits over the discontinued heartburn drug Zantac to go forward, ruling that expert witnesses can testify in court that the drug can cause cancer.
Friday’s ruling by Delaware Superior Court Judge Vivian Medinilla in Wilmington is a setback for former Zantac makers GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim, who had argued that expert witness opinions lacked scientific support.
“This brings us one step closer to justice for our clients,” Brent Wisner, one of the plaintiffs’ lead attorneys, said in a statement Saturday.
GSK, Pfizer and Sanofi said in separate statements that they disagreed with the decision and would appeal. They said there was no reliable evidence that Zantac causes cancer. A spokesman for Boehringer Ingelheim did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2019, some manufacturers and pharmacies stopped selling Zantac after a chemical called NDMA, which is known to cause cancer, was discovered in some pills. Some tests showed that Zantac’s active ingredient, ranitidine, can degrade to NDMA over time or when exposed to heat.
Lawsuits started piling up from people who said they got cancer after taking Zantac. The plaintiffs said the companies knew, or should have known, that ranitidine posed a cancer risk and that they failed to warn consumers.
The US Food and Drug Administration asked the manufacturers to withdraw the drug from the market in 2020. The drug makers have maintained that there is no evidence that Zantac exposed users to harmful levels of NDMA.
Medinilla is presiding over most of the roughly 80,000 cases still pending in the United States over Zantac, which was once the world’s best-selling drug.
In addition to the cases in Delaware, drugmakers are facing about 4,000 claims in California state court and about 2,000 in various state courts across the country.
Last month a jury in Chicago rejected an Illinois woman’s claim that Zantac caused her colon cancer, handing GSK and Boehringer Ingelheim a first-ever victory to go to trial.
Drugmakers scored a major victory in 2022 when another judge threw out about 50,000 lawsuits making similar claims that had been consolidated in federal court in Florida.
That judge concluded that the plaintiffs’ experts’ opinions that Zantac could cause cancer were not supported by sound science. The plaintiffs are appealing this decision.
Zantac became the world’s best-selling drug in 1988 and one of the first drugs to reach $1 billion in annual sales. Originally marketed by a predecessor of GSK, it was later sold to Pfizer, Boehringer and finally Sanofi.
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